Lost and Found

Dearest Baby,
You’ve probably cried real tears for a while now, but today I
found them particularly heartbreaking. But just as you really cry,
you really laugh, too.
You laughed the first time I got a little bit lost with you. Tad
guides me, and I guide the stroller each day home from daycare, and we
must make quite a parade, walking up North 3rd Ave. and down
Montgomery Street. On Tuesday, we turned up the wrong sidewalk. I
can’t blame this on Tad really, because while he hesitated briefly at
that wrong walkway, he didn’t make a definite turn. I was just glad
to get home. A little alarm in my mind sounded that the sidewalk did
not incline as sharply as it should, but I told myself that it didn’t
incline that much after all. I vaguely noticed that the steps were
different, that the building was on the wrong side of the steps, and
even that someone was watching a British movie (or a movie with
British accents, at least), in our apartment, but then I told myself
that maybe I was really hearing the window of the apartment next door.
In any case, I told Tad to wait at the top of the steps, while I
hauled you in your stroller up the steps, the hardest part of the
trip. You began to crack up, and that’s when I knew, before I
inserted the key into a lock it didn’t fit, that I was at Building
112, the building next door. You laughed again as I hauled you in
your contraption back down the steps, then got you turned around so I
could push the stroller across the small space to Building 110, our
building. Then you laughed as I got you up the correct steps.
Somehow your laughter turned getting lost into a kind of game, even
though I’m sure you really laughed at being carried up and down the
steps like a king or maybe you just enjoyed the surprise element at
the end of your ride. But I’ve never felt comfortable about getting
myself lost and found, and I owe that to you.