Saturday, 07 February 2009

• We're lucky the weather has been so beautiful in Colorado this past week... because Ryley lost her coat. It made me sick to think about it; coats are so expensive.

  And the worst thing about it was that we couldn't for the life of us figure out where she left it. The last time we saw it was last Saturday morning when we unsuccessfully attempted to use it as a barricade to keep Juliet from climbing the stairs. After that, it was gone. It was missing on Monday morning, and though we knew she had had it over the weekend, we checked Lost and Found at school. I thought back and remembered that every place we went on Saturday and Sunday, Ryley just wore her sweatshirt with no coat. We looked in both cars. We looked again and again in the coat closet and in her clothes closet, thinking that perhaps we were just overlooking it.  We started looking under beds.  But our house is fairly clean, and how can you misplace a big, purple winter coat?  All week long, Ryley wore her uniform sweater to school and was fine, but we knew that the warm weather couldn't last forever. Sooner or later, she would need her coat.

  Mystified, I began making plans to bite the bullet and go buy her a new one. Until today. Ryan stood in the doorway of Ryley's room as I searched one last time under her bed and in her closet.

  "Ryley? Do you think it could be in your suitcase?" he asked, looking down at the play Strawberry Shortcake suitcase Ryley had carefully placed in her doorway to keep Juliet from entering her room.

  "Maybe," she answered. "Wait, I remember!  It is!"

  Ryley unzipped her suitcase, and there, stuffed in tightly, was her purple coat. She freed it from its week-long prison, and we all three cheered.

  "Why did you put it in there?" I asked.

  "Because I was pretending to take a trip to Antarctica," she answered.

  Other item stuffed in the suitcase? Her little sleeping bag.

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