IT’S THERE; RIGHT WHERE I TOLD YOU
Yes! With fist pump!
Today I found the solder. Let me tell you the story.
I am famous in my family, and even now that the kids have left home, my powers are intact.
IF nobody moved them (that is a fairly important part), I can tell you where an awful lot of things in this house are stored. (It’s also on a card in my storage card file, but nobody other than me looks there.)
I have had that power since before the children were born, but it was just a normal skill, and didn’t develop into a super-power until they were old enough to send on hunting expeditions to the basement (and other places, but the basement is notorious).
The object of my command
was, of course, to retrieve an item I needed (rarely one someone else needed, but it did happen) from the basement storage area WITHOUT me, the maternal parent, having to go down to the basement.
This is the object of the hunting expedition most mothers send most children on.
My mother used to catch me unawares and start her command with, “You’re younger than I am…,” something rather hard to dispute. So I learned from the best (she managed five daughters, a cook, a laundress, a gardener, and a maid or two, with aplomb, but these minions had regular hours, and these orders usually happened after those). Then she would send me upstairs if we were down, and vice versa.
So I would send the Ehrhardtlets down to the basement with very precise instructions describing the appropriate shelf, drawer, or box, and request the item I didn’t want to go up and down two flights of stairs to acquire.
The results of my command
“I can’t find it.”
Or worse: “It’s not there.”
Sigh.
Followed, if I really needed said item, by the traipsing down to the basement (or occasionally up to my office) with said offspring in tow.
And, usually, the highly satisfactory discovery of the item in question EXACTLY WHERE I SAID IT WAS.
Followed immediately by being accused of having ninjas which had quickly put it there, because it wasn’t there when they went down (or up – usually for my good scissors) to look.
Uh huh.
Not just the kids
“I’m going to the hardware store for some solder.”
“We have solder. Did you look in the solder box?”
“There’s no solder in the solder box.”
“Are you sure?” (I’m up three half-flights of stairs.)
“Can’t find it.”
“I’ll be right down; I’m pretty sure we put some away just the other day. You didn’t use all of it, did you?”
“No.”
I go down to the basement. I look to see – having some vague memory of using the labeling tool – whether I put the solder in a different plastic shoebox (and labeled it – because that’s what I do). I look – after asking him – in the boxes where we carefully placed all the parts of the current job that took over the workbench. Nope.
Frustrated, I go back to checking the solder shoebox for the third time.
And there it is! The solder is in the donut-shaped white plastic container, with a loose piece coiled up in the hole. It’s in the box clearly labeled ‘soldering supplies.’ I hand it to the husband, get an incredulous look back.
He has more sense than to mention ninjas, so I, having just located the solder where I said it was, IN ITS PLACE (even though even I couldn’t SEE it), mention them.
We laugh.
And I remain the Queen of the Ninja Storage Vaults.
PS Occasionally it was on the next shelf.
PPS This was used as an occasion of glee.
PPPS I am rarely wrong.
liebjabberings 
My mom used to say, “If I have to come in there and look and I find it, you’re gonna get a whipping.” Now, it amazes her that I can find things that elude her. I say, “My momma taught me to learn how to LOOK.”
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I used to have those conversations with my mother as she got older: she taught me SO many things. She is still with us, but the teaching has stopped. I’m glad your mom can still enjoy what she taught you.
I remember the same conversation – when I made ‘her’ pie crust. She had literally forgotten how, in many years of having to make changes and substitutions. But hers is the best – except I got a husband who was brought up on wet-cardboard pie crust from the bakery/supermarket, and he doesn’t appreciate a flaky crust. Sigh.
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~gasp~ My husband grew up with his mom’s pie crust (made with lard), and nobody else’s can match it. I agree — she had a way with a pie crust, did Mrs. Allen!
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Mother’s is made with solid vegetable shortening cut into the flour with knives.
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Yup. Snake was my mother’s version. I learned from the best.
The underlying reason? Nobody else cares enough to think in advance, or have a place for things – and somehow we’ve trained them to then just ‘ask Mommy.’ OTOH, thousands upon thousands of times, we find what WE need – which is why these systems exist.
My kids were little and watching Ninja Turtles, I guess, when they picked that solution. It stuck.
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Great title! COMPLETELY relatable to anyone with husband or child.
“If it’d been a snake…”
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Yup. Snake was my mother’s version. I learned from the best.
The underlying reason? Nobody else cares enough to think in advance, or have a place for things – and somehow we’ve trained them to then just ‘ask Mommy.’ OTOH, thousands upon thousands of times, we find what WE need – which is why these systems exist.
My kids were little and watching Ninja Turtles, I guess, when they picked that solution. It stuck.
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I’ve got two who … honest to God, Alicia, I wonder how they even find their way into socks. Last time my son was home, he actually asked me IF we had screwdrivers. IF. 24, brilliant, grad school — Ugh.
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Well, did you? Have screwdrivers? Not everyone does, you know.
He was really asking two questions:
1) Where are they?
and
2) Do you trust me with them?
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Oh yeah? You’re so kind, lol!
My husband is a mechanic — a garage full of tools all Bubba’s life. Even I have my own screwdrivers. And he knows we trust him, cause we’ve been buying him tools all his life.
I’m tellin ya, I got two like this. Absent minded professors.
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