Have you seen it?

From roughly February 2004 to February 2007 we had two children using crib mattresses - one in a crib and one in a toddler bed. We bought a crib for Jack, and a mattress to go with it. In making small talk with a colleague I mentioned I needed a toddler bed for Jack to move to before we had Elliot because we didnt' want to buy a second crib and didn't want Jack to feel he was losing his bed to the baby. She gave us the coolest fire truck bed we'd ever seen (and the crib mattress that fit it) and Jack moved that night never looking back. A few nights later the crib moved out, and a few months later Elliot moved in - to the crib.

Elliot didn't care if he lost the crib to the baby - he was crawling out of it by the time he was 13 months old. When he was 14 months old, we bought Jack bunk beds and moved the Fire Truck into Elliot's room, the crib moved to the baby's room and was made with pink sheets a month later. For a year and a half we had three (or almost three) kids in three rooms who slept perfectly!

In February of 2007 Elliot and Jack decided they wanted to share a room. We knew this arrangement was inevitable with the pending adoption and jumped at the opportunity to make the boys think it was all their idea. Elliot moved into the bunk bed (strangely the top bunk as Jack prefers the bottom). His bureau was too big to move into Jack's room, so I stole PJ's taller and thinner bureau for his clothes and moved PJ's into the one in his vacant room (it wouldn't fit in her smaller room, either)... since her clothes were there, we might as well move the baby too, right? But neither Steve nor I had the interest or energy to take apart either the Fire Truck or the crib to move them from room to room so we put her in the toddler bed at 14 months. The bonus was, once we got around to disassembling the crib, we could put the Queen bed back in and have a spare room again. The crib went carefully into the closet, and I remember thinking that when we took it out, it would be for Annie.

Sadly, the story of the crib ends tragically. A friend asked if her brother could borrow it for his baby girl and we agreed, arguing our sentimental hesitation with the practicality that it would do no good in the closet for the next couple of years. In transporting it to the truck a dowel broke off. Investigation of the injury assured us that a drill and 0.05$ replacement dowel would fix it good as new and we delivered it to the expectant dad. We later were told that he didn't want to fix it, and bought a new one instead. Before we could recover it from his garage, his girlfriend put it out on the curb, assuming it was irreparable, and just like that it was gone. My friend called to tell me the bad news, and knowing me well she knew I'd be more upset about the sentimental loss than the crib itself. I didn't cry, but it was a challenge.

The point of this nostalgic tour of our crib is that we definitely had two crib mattresses - one in the crib, one in the toddler bed. We bought Annie a toddler bed last night - a used, handmade wooden one off of Kijiji for $25. No mattress came with it, which is okay b/c we have two, right? Nope. We can't find the second mattress anywhere. My friend tells me her brother had his own mattress, we only loaned him the crib. We've looked in all the obvious places it could be hiding. It's a small mattress, but a mattress none-the-less, not capable of hiding in a dark corner. Steve and I have had moments of purging in the past when we decided something was cheap enough to replace instead of storing. A crib mattress is $30, so it's not out of the rhelm of possibility that it was tossed, but neither of us remember deciding to do so or following through with such a decision. You'd think we'd remember hauling a mattress to the dump.

So, Annie's bed, the first real item we've bought in preparation for her coming, sits hard and bare in the girls' room for now.

N