Losing Clara

The other day we lost Clara. It was the scariest moment I've had since having children. I was busy packing and getting ready to leave, and the kids had been playing outside and inside. Daniel and Xan were around, as was Johanna. Clara had gone upstairs to pack up her backpack, and she had been up there a while. I figured she needed some time alone as she will often take some time to herself. But all of a sudden I realized I hadn't seen her in quite some time. I figured she had fallen asleep, which would have been odd but not unheard of. So I wandered upstairs, and she wasn't there. That's odd, I thought. I looked around the house and didn't see her. I asked Lee, who was playing outside, and Lee said "Mommy, I haven't seen her in a long, long time."

I searched the house again, even pulling down the attic stairs and looking and calling for her up there since I had been up in the attic earlier. I looked in the basement where the cat sleeps, and behind the couch. Then I looked outside. Then I started to panic. I got Johanna involved, and soon Bridges heard what was going on and got off his conference call. This turned into an all-neighborhood search. We went in everyone's house, we searched near the pond, near the screen house, etc...Bridges searched the house again, even going up in the attic again.

I was really scared, because I knew she wouldn't have wandered off by herself, so I thought that something terrible must have happened. I experienced a flash of a future where I would never know what had happened to her, and it was absolutely awful.

But then, after what seemed like a long time, Bridges yelled that he had found her. She had climbed up into the attic, laid down behind a bean bag chair so we couldn't see her from the top of the stairs, and fallen asleep so deeply she didn't hear us yelling for her. We had closed up the stairs after she had fallen asleep, so she was shut up in the attic while we searched the neighborhood.

There were lots of tears, especially from Lee. It's scary to see your parents so frightened.