I lost our children today

I've never done that before. I've known where they were every second of their 10 and 6 years together. I couldn't find them after school. I raced laps around the school; across the playground, past the kinder building, into one hallway, checking classrooms and bathrooms, swing around the other hallway, still checking everywhere, trying to control my rising panic. They were supposed to meet in front of room 16 for the jewelry sale but the sale was called off. Claire was freaking because she'd been told what to do, damn it, and she didn't want to get busted. Kaylie finally met up with Claire and out of the goodness of her heart because she didn't want her baby sister to cry (which means she wanted to buy some jewelry, of course!), asked the teacher who was doing the jewelry sale if she'd bring in the stuff anyway so they could buy something. Lovely teacher that she is, she did. I was actually talking to that teacher when I was walking in to school and she was carrying a box of jewelry. Hey, I had to cut her some slack, we've never had her as a teacher. She didn't know those were my kids. I started alerting teachers and other parents while I ran laps and called anyone I knew who might have seen my girls. For about 90 seconds I stood on the steps in front of the school with my heart heavy as a rock in my gut, told myself that it was time to call Josh. I couldn't find our children. Our daughters, our babies, the golden children we'd be nothing without. I was sure someone saw them alone and took them for themselves and I was going to have to kill myself. And then they appeared like two blue-eyed, brown-haired angels and I wanted to throttle the little jewelry-saturated grins off their faces. They faded quickly enough once they realized what had been going on. They'd been in the classroom - a bungalow - during my frenzy. I took the drive home to cool off (by telling them I couldn't talk to them yet, they were already sobbing at that point) and then got their stories. We cried, hugged, called Daddy and talked about all the different reasons for waiting in the allotted area near the office and how they'd given me a headache I'd never be able to get rid of.

A few hours later we were off to Family Movie Night at school which was a whole new fresh sort of hell. Post-dinner parents burping and farting up a storm in a small-ish auditorium watching Shrek 2 while the kids run around screaming, screaming, screaming , screaming. So much screaming! Without them though, the silence would be deafening.