Several months ago, my college-aged daughter Annie hosted a little get together. She was leaving for an internship in another state for several months. So she invited her friends from Divine Comedy, a BYU sketch comedy group, to our home.
While she was entertaining her friends, Chad and I were entertaining our 2 1/2 year old grandson, Aiden. Morgan and his wife Jessica were on a much needed date. Aiden is A Man On The Move. He burned through all of our toys pretty quickly. It was still light outside, so Chad and I decided to take him outside to play. Let him run off a bit of steam.
We started looking for his jacket. And figured it was probably in the diaper bag.
Here I need to shift into a geriatric Back In My Day anecdote. One of the great scientific advancements of the past two decades are... wait for it... Diaper Bags.
Diaper Bags are SO MUCH COOLER nowadays. Leather, canvas, hipster looking things that could easily pass for holding something much different than burp pads, diapers, wipes, Butt Paste, etc.
Back in the day, there were not a lot of options. Ninety percent of diaper bags were vinyl plastic washable tote bags in either pink, light blue, or green. No other options. They sported bunnies and chicks. They almost all looked the same. The remaining 10% were quilted cloth bags that some crafty mother had sewn by hand. I was in the vinyl category, having come up with the short straw in the anything-that-requires-a-bobbin department.
But due to the incredible technological breakthroughs of the 21st century, there is nary a bunny on the most excellent diaper bags of today. Which brings me back to the story.
Chad and I were looking for where Jessica had left her Cool Kid diaper bag backpack. I went into the kitchen where Annie and friends were eating and socializing. Trying to be unobtrusive and not That Mom.
I found the diaper bag on the kitchen table, grabbed it, and took it into our living room, where Chad and Aiden were waiting. I started digging through it. At the top, it seemed to mostly be clothing. It didn't strike me as odd that there were no diapers, wipes ... I simply figured they were buried. I pulled out a shirt, and then a jacket. I held it up, "Here we go".
But then we noticed it was not an Aiden-sized jacket. It was an adult-sized hoodie.
At that point, Truman, a friend of Annie's whom we had never met before that night, rounded the corner and entered the living room. He grabbed the jacket from me and said "That's my jacket." And then grabbed the backpack with a terse, "That's my backpack."
We had mistaken his backpack for the diaper bag.
All he knew was he saw me come into the kitchen, select his backpack from the table, and take it into the next room. He decided it might be a good idea to follow, and came upon us as I was crouched over his open backpack, holding up his jacket.
Chad and I laughed and I explained my mistake.
"Oh," he said with a bit of relief. "That makes more sense. I just thought you had some sort of Mom Security thing going on."
Luckily, my kids did not and still do not require the type of Mom Security that requires TSA-level searching of all bags. I'm truly grateful for that. But Truman did keep a pretty sharp eye on his bags from that point on. And for just a moment, I was a little nostalgic for pastel vinyl bunnies.
