Manic Monday Blogarrhea: The Keys To Crazy Town

I am a person who believes strongly that if you are going to laugh at something someday, you should laugh about it now. I have a story for you, and it's a doozy.  I'll give you the end first, we lost a set of keys.  Two house keys, two car keys, one key chain. Gone. The story isn't that we lost them, the story is HOW we lost them.  It is a story of what happens to the brain when the brain is in the head of sleepy parents raising three energetic children. Many things had to go exactly wrong in order for this to happen.

We go to church as a family on Sundays, but this Sunday was a little different, one Sunday a year our church holds church outside in one of our beautiful parks by one of our 10,000 lakes.  It is my favorite Sunday of the year, but packing for this event takes a little more than our typical Sunday load.

I had gone out to the garage to find our picnic blanket. As I passed the car, I realized that I was seriously annoyed with our neighbor's tree branches that have been hanging over our driveway and whipping me in the face every time I get in and out of the car.  I decided to stop fantasizing about clipping the tree branches, so I grabbed the clippers out of the garage, along with the blanket, and some camp chairs which we were also packing in the car.  As I loaded the car and clipped the branches (cursing under my breath... and maybe a little over my breath), I placed my husband's keys on the hood of the car.

I don't think I need to tell you the rest of the story for you to know what happened to the keys. They are gone. They are somewhere between our house and the park two cities away.  I have driven freeways looking for a set of keys, I have walked the neighborhood in the middle of the street looking for keys, I have been on my knees in the bushes LOOKING FOR KEYS. The keys are gone.

After I set the keys on the hood of the car, the following chain of events happened:
- We walked out the front door, each holding a twin, and keeping the human cannonball in line.
- Mr. Lindstrom asked me if I had keys.
- I reached into my purse and handed him my keys so we could lock the door, and mentioned that he should grab his keys from the hood of the car where I (idiotically) placed them for "safe keeping" while I (angrily) clipped the branches of the neighbor's tree.
- Mr. Lindstrom and I had to trade twins in order to get them in the proper car seats (which took a surprising amount of coordination).
- We chatted with a neighbor who was passing by looking for his lost dog.

Then we absent-mindedly got into the car, and screeched away as not to be late for "outside" church.  It wasn't until we got to the parking lot for outside church that Mr. Lindstrom looked at me in ernest and said, "you know what? I don't think I ever grabbed the keys from the hood of the car."

Realistically, losing your keys is not really more than a gigantic pain in the ass.  But we learned a valuable lesson: This, my friends, is your brain on parenting.