David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published July 20, 2004

With kids, every missing item requires a "hard target search"

I have a good friend who's about to become a father for the first time. It could happen today, tomorrow or next week. He lives near Chicago now, but we still keep in touch.

I've tried to offer him a little insight into how his life is going to change, but my words simply aren't powerful enough to accurately describe the coming onslaught. There's just too much ground to cover. Oh sure, I told him about the lack of contiguous sleeping hours, the diapers filled with unrecognizable alien substances, the evaporated "free time" and the 4,583 pieces of plastic that will magically appear in his house. That's the obvious stuff. Those are the highlights everyone tells you about before you become a parent.

What we parents neglect to tell the "incoming freshmen" are the little things, the wildly strange, yet daily, occurrences that make raising children so interesting.

For example, I lost my glasses a few days ago. In my pre-child life, a minor problem like that wouldn't have been a big deal. I'd look in the half dozen or so places where I usually put them.

The worst-case scenario is if I didn't find them after a couple of days, I'd simply buy a replacement pair. Problem solved, and I'm a 20/20 man again.

With kids, however, it's not that easy.

Instead of looking only in the half dozen likely locations, my search radius is a tad larger with kids in the equation -- roughly an entire ZIP code. My daughter is a little over 3 years old, and my son is 19 months. Search the world over and you will never find 20 stickier fingers, both literally and figuratively. Bangladesh's world-class pickpockets have nothing on these two.

A search for my glasses now requires me to walk a mile in their wee shoes. I've got to think like a little kid. If I were 3 years old, where would I hide Daddy's glasses? If I were 19 months old, where would I most likely drop them when something shinier and more interesting presented itself? So I spend a good part of the day looking for my glasses not on my night stand, on the kitchen counter or atop my TV, but rather in the toilet, in the litter box, in the cupboard behind the can of refried beans and in a dresser drawer under a pile of sweatshirts I haven't worn in a decade.

When it comes to a pricey item like eyeglasses, I'm happy to conduct, as Tommy Lee Jones said in The Fugitive, "a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in the area." The trouble is I don't have the manpower and resources of the U.S. Marshals Service at my disposal, so over the last three years I've learned that sometimes it's easier to buy a replacement than to search for wayward pair.

Earlier this summer I lost a lawn sprinkler. I searched our yard for a few minutes, but pretty quickly resigned myself to the fact that it would be easier and quicker to just buy a new one. sprinkler is the kind that spins around and sprays water from five or six little arms. To a little kid, I'm sure it's a heckuva lot of fun to play with, maybe even sneak it indoors and hide it under a pile of stuffed animals where it won't be discovered until we pack up her room for college.

People on stage are always telling audiences about their kids - musicians, standup comedians, politicians, actors, you name it. Just mentioning that they have kids will draw big rounds of applause. Before I had kids, I never understood why. "What's the big deal?" I used to think to myself. "It's hardly a unique accomplishment. Are we applauding because his you-know-what works? Get to the show, already."

I now understand why we applaud. We, the audience, are impressed he was able to track down his car keys and make it to the performance. We're applauding his search skills. Does he have his wallet, too? There's another round of applause we owe him. Cell phone? More applause. If, somehow, he managed to find the box of Tic-Tacs he purchased the day before, well, that deserves a standing ovation.

Of course, my friend with the baby on the way won't have to worry about this stuff for quite a few months, but it's coming. I'd recommend stowing an extra pair of eyeglasses in the medicine cabinet, just in case.

Incidentally, I think I'm to blame for my missing glasses. I suspect I placed them on our minivan's roof and drove off. That's another dirty little secret of fatherhood -- short-term memory goes out the window. I just hope my pal remembers to take his baby off the trunk before driving home from the maternity ward.

I'm sure he will, though. For every headache associated with parenthood, there are 10 joys. That's the best secret.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.