The Cow Hunt

My kids have a TON of toys.  Most days I think it's too many.  However, when people say that kids have so many toys that they don't even know what they have - I have to disagree.  We have too many that take up a lot of room, but Caroline knows EVERY toy she has and EVERY piece to EVERY toy.  Seriously.  She will pull out toys just to check and make sure everything is in its place.  She knows that she has 9 princesses in her castle currently - including 2 Snow White's and 2 Cinderella's.  She knows that in her wooden food group toys there are 6 fruits and 4 dairy items.  She knows that there are 6 animals in her Little People farm.  Because she is well aware of all this, I have become the same way.  If I don't know where every single thing is, then I can't help her find things and then a meltdown will occur.

I have a love/hate relationship with this.  We never lose toys and her room is virtually always organized.  The only downside is that we can never have huge playgroups here.  Seriously...too many kids poses a threat that too many things could go missing.  5 or 6 big kids is our limit...unless we are outside playing and not getting into the inside toys.  As I type that out I am actually realizing that it's not a bad thing :)

The other morning, however, something went terribly wrong.  Caroline pulled out some puppets.  She will put them in a line to make sure they are all accounted for before she starts playing.  As soon as she set them out, she saw that all four birds were present, but one of the farm animals was not.

The cow was gone!!!  Yikes!  We launched a full scale cow hunt that morning.

She started looking in the most logical place...the barn.  Even though the puppet is almost the size of the barn, she still had to look in each tiny little spot. :)

She looked in all of her drawers, under her bed, with her dolls and wasn't able to find Mr. Cow.  She was sad.

Very sad..

Even Ann Parker was distraught.

Finally, after a thorough inspection of her dress up bin, she found Mr. Cow among the tutus, pompoms, and sequins.

So excited to have Mr. Cow back with his buddies!!!  Right before this all happened, she poured water on herself...I don't usually put my kids in dirty clothes.  I let them get dirty themselves!