At least it kicked in for me eventually!

Our apartment complex has quite a few families with kids the same ages. We have a sort of standing appointment at the playground at 10 am, this being the time the more motivated moms come home from their walks (pushing three kids each in double joggers!). There is also a lot of new babies in the complex. The other day I came out and of the 7 parents that were out at that moment (including Aiden and I) 5 had babies six months or younger.

Anyway, during our playtime on Tuesday Annie and her friend, Brooklynn, who is 4, disappeared. This is not all that rare as the kids have a hill right next to the playground they love to run up and sometimes they are 20 feet from us but cannot be seen. Or they will go into one of the many hidden viewed stairwells for a minute or two. The kids all have set boundaries as to how far they can ride their bikes or walk with friends. They also know they have get permission to leave our sight. So when we realized the girls were missing we were not that concerned. Until we called for them and they failed to appear. We looked in our apartments; no girls. We looked behind the buildings; no girls. We walked down by the road and by the swampy part of the grounds where the boys will hunt for lizards; no girls.

It's now been 5 or 10 minutes since they were missing. But it felt like an hour. Finally, one of the neighbor boys was ringing his new bike bell in one of the stairwells beyond where the kids are allowed and the girls showed up. One of the mommies with a brand new baby (5 days at the time) has a daughter who had been in their preschool class. They wanted to see if Bella could play. Annie knows she is not allowed to go to Bella's house alone or without telling us. She told Brooklynn it was okay. When they knocked the mommy was sleeping and Bella answered the door. She asked (someone) if she could come out and the answer was "in a little while". Their grandma is in town to help for a couple of weeks. I have briefly met her once in March. She asked the girls to come in so she could see who it was and then they got sidetracked with playing and forgot to come back out.

I'm not saying Annie and Brooklynn have no responsibility in this situation. Annie was grounded and had a great big talk about how scary that is. Once she was found the fear gave way to anger so I'm sure "the talk" was pretty traumatic for her. I figure it is evened out by the trauma the rest of us all went through in the mean time. But here's my point (I did have one!): If you were the grandma and two little girls showed up at the house with no phone calls from any moms ahead of time to see if they could come to play, no adult at the door with them, and the request to "COME OUTSIDE", would common sense not scream into your head that someone may be worried?!

The entire time I was growing up I was teased about having no common sense. I have now realized there are people with a far more dire situation in regards to common sense than I have ever been in. At least I eventually learned to make do without or grew some or something. This woman is a freakin' grandma and has yet to grow enough to not make us want to call the cops for missing kids who she was inadvertently holding hostage.