mommy to the rescue, again

[fox]

I've stopped keeping track of which parent finds the important missing Lego piece how many times; Himself and I are about even when it comes to saving the day in that particular area. But this weekend the prince got a(nother; help us, we're total pushovers) Super Mario tie-in set, and this time he built the whole thing almost entirely by himself, which was pretty awesome—in the past he's become frustrated with the smaller pieces and lost interest partway through more involved projects, so the fact that he saw this one all the way to the end was a breakthrough. A couple of nights in a row we've allowed him to bring the whole business upstairs so he can play with it some more at bedtime, which is a-ok by me—anything that makes the other parts of bedtime go faster is great in my book, and telling him "You can have extra playtime if you don't dawdle over brushing your teeth" e.g. is right now the only thing that gets him not to dawdle over brushing his teeth, so, great—but of course he can't leave it up there during the day, oh no, he has to bring it down again so he can play with it in the family room in the morning and after dinner. (Play in his bedroom when his dad and I are awake in common areas? Not never, but not usually.)

So this morning he and his dad were bringing the thing downstairs, and parts of it came unconnected, of course—not a disaster, because as we've told him from the very beginning, the great thing about Legos is that when they come apart you can put them back together again—and then he couldn't find one piece that was important to a part of the thing for some reason, I don't know, there's a diving board and there was a blue "pool" tile that was supposed to connect from here to there and he couldn't find it, no, it wasn't that one, it was something else, they were both sure he'd had it when the setup was upstairs, where could it be now, ugh, okay, there wasn't actually time to scour the whole house for it before it was time to go to day camp. We insisted he eat some breakfast and promised we'd find the piece before he came home.

Took a few minutes a few minutes ago to look for it. I'm looking at the instructions, looking at other projects it could be connected to, it's not under the couch, it's not behind his bookshelf in his room. I've got to where I'm counting pieces by color, and Himself came by to help, and when I was looking at other setups he said "But I don't see how it could have ended up with any of those, because he had it this morning, it's just that lots of parts fell off when we were getting it downstairs." He went to look in the kid's room and on the landing again, it was neither of those places. "So maybe it dropped somewhere else?" I suggested. "Like under your dresser?" No, it wasn't there either, though it was worth a shot, because the boy came through our room while I was brushing my teeth to tell me his dad was having a hard time with all the pieces. "And it didn't, like, fall into your pocket somehow?"

Himself pats all his pockets and says "OH MY GOD."

Yep, this morning when all three of us were looking for the damned thing, it was in his pocket behind his wallet so he couldn't feel it in there. It hadn't fallen in; he'd put it in there and promptly forgotten about it, which is what I do, so nobody expected him to do it as well. The diving-board-with-landing-pool arrangement is reassembled as it should be. When I pick the kid up this afternoon I will tell him the missing Lego was in Daddy's pocket the whole time. For the moment, I am the winner.