We had just visited the museum on black Friday, and although the crowd wasn’t nearly as large as the post thanksgiving museum rush, it was moderately turbulent with bodies. There had been a private event there in the morning, so there was a number of name tagged adults travelling in packs, which I now realize cut down on one’s ability to see a distance compared to the flocks of much shorter regulars.

My son was enjoying the imitation tree trunk slide in the toddler-only “simulation duck pond” area, sliding head first, feet first – whatever the daredevil before him did, he would imitate. I was trying to balance my hovering, protecting, “keep your freaky kids away from my kid” instinct with some healthy distance to allow him to explore and connect with other kids without feeling like there was a gigantic dad shaped shadow following his every footstep. He was on his way to slide drop number four when it happened.

I watched him get off the slide, walk around it’s length, move toward the steps to go another round – then he disappeared.

I checked under the slide.

I checked the line of kids on the slide.

I checked behind the slide.

He was gone.

Immediately I found the nearest purple shirted staff member, and in what I imagine was an increasingly panicky tone, explained that “I’ve lost my child. He is wearing a black sweater with drawings of cassette tapes on it. He is blonde and two years old.”

While she left to find another staff person with a walkie-talkie to distribute his description through out the museum, I started to fan out in increasing distances with increasing stress. A half dozen concerned parents asked me what my son looked like, and I repeated some breathless, scrambled version of the same description – “black sweater…blonde hair…cassette tapes” – to each of them. My head filled with increasingly awful thoughts about kidnappers, him getting injured, and how terrible of a parent I must have appeared to everyone involved.

In what might have been as much as two minutes but felt like two days an immensely helpful man tapped me on the shoulder and asked “Is that your son?”

Walking toward me, arms filled with a bag of potato chips, a strip of string cheese, and a packet of oreo cookies (there would have been more if he could carry it) was my little dude, repeating the same two words over and over.

“Juice box? Have a juice box?”

Apparently he had decided it was time for lunch, and rather than letting me know he wanted to eat, he had used his midget ninja stealth to make a b-line for the café that was at least 40 feet away across the hall, horde and steal several items, and walk back to me without alerting café staff in the slightest.

Immensely grateful to all the helpful parents and staff, I did my best to explain to Owen over lunch that

1. he should always stay near me,
2. tell me if he wants to have lunch, and
3. that stealing a loaf of bread is okay to do if you have to feed your starving family, but stealing oreo cookies and potato chips is going to be uncool in any scenario.

As long as I can remember, I’ve woken up with numbness in my right arm. I always had assumed it was cheap beer, a cheap bed, or crappy sleeping style, but two or three years ago, the numbness turned into weakening and mild pain on long drives. After a few MRIs I was diagnosed with multiple cervical stenosis and degenerative disk disease. Which is a fancy way of saying the disks in my neck were falling apart, and some of them were leaning on my spinal cord, Avon Barksdale style.

A lot of things made a lot more sense after that. If I would sneeze too hard, my right arm would seize into pain. Now I knew why. The sleeping numbness made sense now. But the discomfort was transient and the pain a 2 out of 10 at its worst, so I decided to try a combination of pharmaceuticals as needed and physical therapy to straighten things out.

For about two years this seemed to help out enough that we were able to get through our first son’s birth without any major problems. But in May of 2008, after pumping up an inflatable pool for my now 2-year-old, I woke up repeatedly with the most excruciating arm (and now neck) pain I can say I’ve ever felt.

Today my surgeon laughed at me when I expressed concern about neck strength after being in a brace for such a long period of time. “Neck strength?!” he asked in his intimidating but surprisingly affable German accent. “Neck strength is the LAST thing I’m worried about.” Given the titanium bracket in my neck, this makes more than a modicum of sense.

Hoping I get stronger, faster, better. Also sexier and more not stupider in smarts.