Where has my mind gone?

I don’t know what’s going on with me lately, but I’m an incredibly forgetful mess.  It doesn’t even seem to matter if I put reminders in my phone, on my desk calendar, post things on the refrigerator and tack sticky notes to the front door. 

This morning I remembered the biggest thing I’ve forgotten so far.  When I dropped the kids off at school and left The Bandit at kindergarten it occurred to me that I was the snack mom this week.  And I’d signed up for cricket duty too. 

What, pray tell, is “cricket duty” you ask?  The Bandit’s kindergarten class room is like a petting zoo.  There’s a turtle, a guinea pig, two giant assed bearded dragons, a tankful of fish, and two fairies, William & Gwen, that live behind cute little doors up on the wall.  The lizards, Spike & Zippy, eat crickets.  Each week a parent is in charge of feeding them. 

I ran to Target and picked up some snacks – enough for today and tomorrow, and managed to sneak into the classroom and leave them while the kids were all out at an assembly and only got to work 15 minutes late.  Pretty good, I’d say.

When I picked them up from school, The Bandit was carrying a clear plastic

See the weird tubes

 box with odd tubes inside.  He kept insisting that we, WE mind you, needed to catch a bunch of crickets and put them inside.  Yeah.  That wasn’t going to happen of course.  We got to the pet store and the three of us trooped in: me in my work clothes, Sassy in her school uniform, and The Bandit in his karate gi.  We brought the mysterious cricket box with us.

“We need fifty crickets,” I told the fish guy at the store.  “Does that sound like  a lot?”

you can tell none of these kids are mine because their hair is brushed.

“Nah, that’s normal.  They’re over here.”  He led us to a big box full of egg crates and about a gazillion tiny crickets.

I looked at the box warily.  “You’re going to get them out, right?”

“Sure, I can do that.”  He laughed at the mom doing the heebie jeebies over the crickets.

“I think they go in this box, right?” I showed him the mysterious box. 

“Yep.”

“Can you make that happen?”  I really didn’t want to mess with these crickets.  One cricket in the living room is pesky.  Fifty wee crickets hopping all over you is another thing entirely.

Mr Smirky put the crickets in the box and we went up to pay.  As we walked down the aisle, I laid down the law.  “You do not take the caps off the tubes.  You do not open the box.  You do not drop the box in the car.  You don’t mess with the crickets in any way.  You got that?”

“Yeah, Mom,” The Bandit agreed to the terms, but I had my suspicions about his full commitment to the rules.  He has a tendency to forget once his curiosity gets the better of him.  He wanted to keep the crickets in his room.  Yeah – I nixed that idea right away.

When My Honey came home from school, I showed him the cricket box from where I stored it on top of the refrigerator.  Out of sight – Out of mind.  When I brought the box down to eye level, all the crickets were gone. 

GONE!

I hope and pray they are all in the tubes.  My Honey says they are but he might be telling me that just to keep my hysteria down to a controllable level.