It’s every mother’s challenge.
Trying to figure out where their kids’ mittens, boots, shoes, hats and even coats are at. What’s worse is then they start attending school and these items don’t come home anymore.
I know I’m not the only one who has children with this problem because when I went to my sons’ school to dig through the lost and found bin, there were three bins. In fact, so many items had been lost that they had a system for it. One bin was for all the missing hats, a second was for mittens and gloves, and the third was just about anything else a child could lose, including coats, backpacks, sweatshirts and lunch boxes.
I was able to find two pairs of mittens and two hats my children had lost, but where the other 10 plus pairs of mittens and gloves went I have no idea.
I have tried decrease the amount of lost items, including purchasing clips that attach the mittens to the coat. The boys lost those too. Yes. They lost the clips that attached the mittens to the coat. In fact, I could almost bet that four of their lost mittens still have the clips attached to them.
When I was growing up, I can recall my mother would sew our mittens to yarn or shoelaces. She would then put the shoelaces or mittens through the sleeves of the coat. I thought about doing this and then I saw how my sons’ continued to get caught on everything with just the clips and figured I’d rather have them losing gloves and mittens, then arms.
The amount of money I spend a year on trying to keep my children warm is nuts. Even when I buy the cheap two pairs of mittens for $1, it starts to add up. Plus, I don’t like sending them to school with light-weight mittens when its below freezing. Sometimes, I double up the cheap mittens, but then when they lose them two are gone at once instead of one.
So I end up purchasing them, nice, heavy winter, waterproof mittens to wear.
However, I think they have already lost all of the $17 pairs of mittens I bought for them this year. In case your wondering, I bought three of the expensive pairs for each son.
I figured they would make it to the end of the year with two out of the six pairs left. That is simply not going to happen. They are all gone already and it’s February. Everyone around here knows we could have winter until May so not buying more is just not an option.
To top it off. My oldest son didn’t even bring his winter coat home one weekend. He said he went to get it and his backpack at the end of school and it was gone.
Luckily, the school had an extra coat to give him since it was 30 degrees out. As soon as he got off the bus, I noticed he wasn’t wearing his own coat. After he told me what had happened, I figured another student probably just grabbed his coat on accident and didn’t notice until later. This happened on a Friday, but on Monday, my son’s coat was back.
As I try and decide how much more to spend on my sons’ mitten and gloves for the remainder of the year, I figured I’d let all the moms out there know it’s apparently normal for kids to lose all of their stuff when they are younger.
Stay strong my moms and remember just like all the other phases our children have had to go through -- this too shall pass.
It just might not pass before we’ve wasted a lot of money on mittens they may only use once.
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