The Case of The Missing Pacifier

When your scrunchy, little, tomato faced newborn is wailing like a broken smoke detector, you feel like the whole world would be a better placed if your darn offspring would just take a damn pacifier. When (and if) they do take a liking to the succulent little morsel you keep shoving in their mouth, suddenly life looks a whole lot more manageable. You get three whole hours of sleep at a time (perhaps) and you fantasize about duct taping the pacifier to your baby's mouth. Bliss.

Fast forward 2 years...

You're crawling around on the floor at 1 am in a deranged panic looking for a tiny bit of rubber and plastic that is sure to give your child braces, a speech impediment and cancer. What seemed like an innocent and adorable little soothing device is actually a deal with the devil because now your baby can't sleep without it. Awesome.

We stayed the weekend at Jeff and Gabrielle's, and somewhere between lunch and bedtime, we lost The-Item-Of-Utmost-Importance. The one that is attached to Charlie at all times via a chord and safety pin. I put him to bed with much fear and trepidation, but after an evening of running around Torrey Pines, and eating dinner on the boardwalk in Del Mar, he was so out of energy he didn't even notice his pacifier was missing when I laid his downy curly head, on his soft pillow in his crib pack'n'play. Staying asleep however, was not something his fairy godmother fated his poor, tuckered out mum, and without his ability to self soothe, it was shaping up to be a really. long. night. I tried ignoring him, I tried readjusting his blanket, I tried patting him on the head and assuring him that life would go on without his paci... but it was like trying to reassure teenager they could live without texting.

After waking up out of a dead sleep for the fifth time, there was not a shred of logic left in my brain. Despite the fact that I'm nearly blind without contacts or glasses, and despite it being pitch black in a large house that wasn't my own, I grabbed my cell phone and started crawling through the house on my hands and knees, vowing not to give up until I found The-Thing-Of-Utmost-Importance. How I thought I would be able to find it sightless and in the dark when I couldn't find it during daylight was not allowed to cross my mind. I got the brilliant idea that maybe it had gotten caught on a couch cushion or under a piece of furniture, so as I prowled around the living room in my striped pajama pants and purple cell phone, I came across a pair of shoes, a wallet...then a cell phone, but no pacifier. I ran my hands underneath the couch and could have sworn I heard someone breathing deeply, when I felt someone's breath, hot on my face as I went to scour the cushions, I almost chalked it up to hyperbolic imagination (such was the intensity of my one sighted focus on the quest) but then my hopelessly malfunctioning vision came to the alarming realization I was nose to nose with a strange man who was sleeping on aforementioned couch. While I was trying to decide whether to scream or die of embarrassment, my brain caught up with my mental freak out and I remembered that I had met this man before and been told he would be sleeping on the couch. Which was good. What would not have been good... him waking up to see a wild, blue haired woman staring at him from inches away. So I crawled my mortified, delirious self back to bed...

And found Charlie's pacifier along the way.
In a different couch.