On a brisk, December Sunday morning, my two year old son and I took at trip to the Please Touch Museum, as we had done a half dozen times or so since we moved to Philadelphia in October.

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 7:25 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.