Life has been busy here in our Level of Awareness.

Maybe a little TOO busy, and not in that conventional overworked kind of way.

If you are the parent of a toddler I want to share with you a hypothetical situation that may save you almost infinite amounts of grief later. Listen, think, and learn.

Let’s just say, hypothetically, that you are working on A Big Project. A Big Project that, hypothetically, involves your embroidery machine. If you had one. Picture if you will, all your crafty thingies spread out on a craft table in your living room or den or craft room or whatever, with your toddler playing happily at your feet, intermittently watching a video. A nice, wholesome, Disney video. It’s an idyllic scene of domestic bliss.

The one ant in the picnic is that the embroidery machine is a bitchy little piece of machinery, because they must hire cut-rate third-world programmers to write software that run the things. In exasperation, you realize that you must reload, for the fiftieth time, the guidance software for the machine. So you trudge to the upstairs room where such things are kept. And, as you are, in your imaginary situation, a computer and gadget geek, there are many, many of “such things” to sort through. Thankfully, your husband, who is, hypothetically, a bigger computer and gadget geek than you are, comes in from cutting the lawn to find exactly what you have been searching for.

As he hands you the software, he mentions incidentally (and hypothetically) that your son let the dogs out into the yard, and oh-by-the-way, where IS Harry?

…

There is that long, hypothetical moment where you look at each other in blank stupidity as it dawns on your that your clever little toddler has learned to unlock the outside door locks.

Which, hypothetically, results in wild, panicked, screaming searches of the house and the back yard, with your heart in your throat, and eighty million tableaus, none of which end happily, running through your brain.

At which point, in your scenerio, you cave into the fact that your toddler, who hates being in a room without you, has indeed simply wandered off, and you, the hypothetically WORST PARENT IN THE UNIVERSE, somehow missed that fact.

Oh. But it gets MUCH better than that.

MUCH.

Because, at the point where you are starting your full-scale dogs-and-helicopters assault on the neighborhood, two, count them, TWO, hypothetical police cruisers pull up in front of your house and ask you if you are looking for a lost child.

WHO IS IN THE BACK SEAT. GRINNING.

And who does NOT understand why his mommy, the WORST MOMMY IN THE UNIVERSE, is screaming hysterically, when he had a wonderful adventure with the nice policemen. The nice policemen who brought him home and told his, hypothetical parents, that their precious little bundle was picked up two blocks away, on a street that is notoriously known for speeding cars, and in a few minutes was about to be bundled off to the DHS. The nice policemen who never thought to ASK him where he lived, which he was perfectly capable of telling them – as he later demonstrated with 100% accuracy over fifty times in the next two days. Hypothetically, anyway.

A scene of domestic bliss gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I’m not saying this happened.

But it could.

So you might want to think about it.