A weekend of misplaced children, overpriced dinners, and snot.

I’ve been fighting off a cold since the beginning of January.  It started to set in the first week of January and again the 2nd week of January, but my body-the TEMPLE that it is-fought back valiantly.  That is until it couldn’t fight it off anymore, so I’ve been hacking, coughing, blowing my nose, and generally feeling like my head is a sloshy mess for two weeks.

Tate and I had a date set up for last Friday night, so despite feeling like crud-o-la, we packed the kids off to the trusty Parent’s Night Out program at one of the local churches.  This was the first time we’d been able to do this since August, Carson was actually sent off with the big, elementary age kids for the first time ever and Ella stayed with the other preschoolers.  The church makes you take a card with your child’s information on it and it must be used to get your child back.  No card-no kid.  I guess they send those to the dungeon at the church if the parents don’t have their card at the end of the night. I don’t want to find out!

The older kids only get signed in, no card was given when Carson was dropped off, which made Tate very nervous.  I’m protective of the kids, sure, but Tate is even more protective and he didn’t feel at all comfortable with the way it didn’t seem as secure for the older kids.  I brushed it off and assured him that he was being a little anal and to relax because it DATE NIGHT WOO HOO! (Cough, snort, where’s my cold medicine?!?!)

We ate at one of those Brazilian restaurants where the men come by with hunks of meat that they carve off for you.  Our date included three other couples- there was lots of laughing and wine sipping and general merriment.  It’s all fun and games until the bill shows up, amirite?!  HOLY $126 DINNER.  I mean, it was fun to hang out with friends and eat a lot of carved meat, but it wasn’t $126 fun.  This part of the post has nothing to do with anything-really it’s just a public service announcement:  BEWARE OF BILLS AT BRAZILIAN STEAKHOUSES.

You’re welcome!

So if you’re one of those sleuth types, you may have already realized that when we went to pick up the kids, we learned that the night didn’t go so well for Carson.  Somehow, not too long before we came to pick him up, Carson got separated from his class as they were leaving the movie room. He says that he went straight back to his classroom, but nobody was there.  Somehow he managed to make it all the way upstairs, where a volunteer eventually found him sobbing.

I have no idea what the actual timeline of events really is, I have no idea if his teacher ever even knew he was missing.  I’m confused how a child could get separated from his class and manage to make it past where I would have assumed adults would have been monitoring doors and up a set of stairs before he was found.  I don’t want to be alarmist or make a mountain out of a molehill, but you know-when you trust people to watch your child-and that is basically their SOLE responsibility, it’s a bit disconcerting that something like this could happen.

I hardly slept that night, waffling between being utterly FURIOUS and grateful that he was smart enough not to go outside or get lost in the church. (It’s one of those mega churches with a school attached, so he could have easily gotten lost in the building.)

I should have called the director of the Parent’s Night Out Program, but I was afraid that I’d cry and sound either like a blubbering mom or a maniac.  I did email the director, though, so that she’ll at least be aware that they LOST MY CHILD last Friday.  Obviously they need to put into place a better system for keeping track of kids.

Unrelated to any of this, my cold is almost gone!  So that’s good, right?