Yesterday Eli took my wallet and hid it, and then forgot where he’d put it. Is there any feeling as awful as not knowing where your wallet is? Does it really make sense for us to keep all those important items in one place? I’m seriously considering having seven mini wallets or something, so that if I lost one, I wouldn’t have to get all new everything. That’s the panic in it: knowing you’d have to call for new credit cards, library cards, insurance cards, and deal with the DMV again. I can’t even make a call to Time and Temperature without getting bugged by small people; the thought of having to repopulate my wallet…it wouldn’t be possible.

Eli is famous for taking an odd item (lemon juicer, toenail clippers) and putting it somewhere so incongruous that you can’t find it no matter how hard you look. You only find it three weeks later when you happen to be cleaning out the toy box or getting out a cocktail napkin. So I was justifiably freaking out about my lost wallet. I guess the small very small minor upside is that I cleaned up the entire upstairs as I was searching for it. It ended up being downstairs, behind the couch, sneakily resting on the baseboard heater so that when I looked under the couch I couldn’t see it. I finally found it by doing a zen think-like-Eli meditation. Phew!

Eli was no help. I even told him that if we didn’t find my wallet, then I might get pulled over while driving and arrested for driving without a license and put into jail and he’d have to go into foster care. This might have been more effective if it wasn’t a threat that introduced about nine new concepts at once. In the end, he was as surprised as I was to find the wallet behind the couch.