The Case of the Missing Sheets and Blanket

In May 2000, about one year after Angie and I were married, we moved to Freeport, Texas (just south of Houston) for our first internship. The company was providing a fully furnished apartment, complete with weekly cleaning and linen service. We arrived Saturday afternoon. The since the company arranging the housing details was closed on the weekend, they simply left a key for us. We obtained the key and went to the apartment they had previously communicated was ours. We were surprised when the key provided wouldn't open our apartment, so we went to the apartment complex office to straigten things out. They simply asked us which apartment we were in and quickly provided us with a new key. When we entered our apartment, it was missing a lot of things--cooking utensils, tupperware, and linens, among others. Again, we couldn't contact anyone at the housing office until Moday when it opened. No problem, we thought. We can adapt and deal with the situation given to us. After unpacking our car, we made a run to Wal-Mart and purchased the basic items we needed to survive the weekend, including a set of sheets for the bed--white sheets with purple flowers. On Monday we called the housing provider and found out they gave us to the wrong apartment information. The apartment we were supposed to be in was ready and this one was not supposed to be ready for another week when its new occupants would be moving in. Now we understood why our original key didn't work. Imagine if someone had already been living there when we arrived! Since we had already moved in, we asked to stay. It being our first exposure to Texas heat and humidity, we were not anxious to move out and in again to a second story apartment in that terrible weather. The company was nice enough to oblige and soon finished preparing the apartment. We kept the sheets since we had already used them. Over the following years the sheets invoked memories of this experience whenever we saw them and quickly became our favorite set of sheets. Now, fast-forward a few years to 2004, about a month after Benjamin was born. At this point we had moved seven more times and were living in Houston, Texas. We had the pleasure of receiving a visit from my parents, my younger brother, and one of my older brothers, along with his wife and two kids. They drove all the way from Utah, which must have been a very long 3-day drive for the two kids ("Brian and Angie live 3 days away from us!"). We pulled out all the linens we could find to host our guests, including our favorite white sheets with purple flowers. We had a great visit and were sad when the end of the week came and our guests packed up and left for home. We washed all the linens and stored them away until next time we would need them. A little while later, Angie and I were washing the sheets on our bed. We decided we wanted to put our favorite sheets on the bed, so we went to the linen closet to pull them out. They weren't there. "How strange," we thought. We couldn't imagine where we had put them. We pulled out a different set and finished the task at hand. Over the following weeks we searched the house, but couldn't find the sheets with the purple flowers. Since they were not in our house, we decided they must have found their way into my families suitcases. We called them with no avail--they had not seen our sheets, but promised to double-check. Over the following weeks and months we searched anywhere we could think they might end up and asked my family again, but never had any success. Fast-forward again to late 2009. For Thanksgiving this year we enjoyed the company of most of Angie's immediate family with their spouses and kids. Only one sibling's family was not able to make it since they had just moved to Australia. Once again we pulled out all the sheets and blankets we could find so our guests would have suitable bedding. One of these items was a warm furry "wolf" blanket. We had a great week, enjoyed a great Thanksgiving feast together, and missed them once they left. Some weeks after this I was having a hard time finding a nice warm blanket in our house to use while in the basement. Part of the problem is the fact that the blankets never stay in the same place. During the day the blankets move all over the house as the kids build forts, tunnels, walls, and anything else a blanket can be used to construct. I always had to search the house to find where the blankets were last discarded. Then, when I do find a blanket, it might be one of the kids blankets which are a bit small for me. I am left with the decision to keep searching or try to curl up into as small a ball as possible and positioning the blanket in a diagonal fashion to provide the longest coverage from my feet on up. It seemed, however, that our large blankets were sparser than before. Then it hit me one day that I had not seen our "Wolf" blanket for a quite some time. No wonder it has been hard to stay warm--our warmest blanket was missing. Now, this blanket has been a favorite of mine for a while--my mom purchased it for me when I moved to college. It was my bed cover at college and through my two-year mission in Florida. It travelled with Angie and I through our eleven moves in the past ten years. It has been especially useful during the winters in Virginia to keep me warm while watching TV in our cold basement. Over the following weeks I searched all around the house to find the missing blanket. I asked Angie and the kids several times if they had seen it. I could not imagine where the missing blanket had gone. I sort of started wondering if someone in Angie's family had packed it up and taken it with them. "No," I thought, "they wouldn't have done that--the blanket is just too big for them to have gathered it up without noticing." I really missed the blanket. Yes, part of it was due to the sentimental value and the memories. Thinking about it also reminded me of the missing sheets and how we were never able to find them. However, I think I missed it most because none of our other blankets could keep me as warm as that one. We have had some very cold days lately and I have had to pile on multiple blankets to achieve the same warmth and coverage it provides. One day this week I came home to find a large gift bag sitting on our bed with my name on it. Angie went out of character and fancied it up with color-coordinated tissue paper and had attached a large card to it. My birthday had already come and gone, so it couldn't be a birthday present. When I asked Angie what it was, and she just smiled and said, "A present for you." I pulled out the tissue paper to discover the long-lost wolf blanket folded up nicely inside. Angie had found the missing blanket in Jacob's room. It had fallen behind the Futon and landed on a bar that runs across the back about a foot above the floor. We had previously looked under the Futon, but not behind it.

We are very pleased to have solved the mystery of the disappearing wolf blanket. However, the mystery of the missing sheets still remains unresolved. In the back of our minds, we still wonder if my little brother has been hiding them since his visit to our house in 2004 because he has an affinity for purple flowers. So, if you happen to visit him, go check out his bed for me and let me know if you find a set of white sheets with purple flowers.

Grandma's Gift

We spent so much time, money and energy remodeling our kitchen. It looks amazing. Really it does. Except that we ran our of time, money and energy before we finished. Knowing the floor should be the last thing to replace, we waited and waited and waited as all the details were taken care of one by one. Painting. Cabinets. Etc. In process we:

• ripped the linoleum one of the zillion times when the fridge had to be pulled out
• inherited a fridge that was three inches wider so we shifted the cabinets over making a three inch hole the entire depth of the cabin
• burned a black hole when cutting out the old floor to put the toe boards in

Before any of this started, the floor was hard to clean because it had lost its sheen shall we say. Today I swept and mopped and got down on my hands and knees to clean this stupid floor. Check it out. This is post cleaning.

Nasty. As if I hadn't even touched it at all. It is officially impossible to clean and feels gross on my feet within a day of a serious clean. It's been making me nuts forever. Brian and I have been talking and are just about ready to do it. Grandma said she wants to help. Gotta love her.

Kid Free House to Kid Proof Zone

I'm pretty sure from chatting with old timers in the neighborhood that no children have ever lived in our home. Never. Do you find that as weird as I do? The house is thirty plus years old. You'd think it would have been graced by at least one year of baby spit up, toddler toys or homework at the kitchen table. Anyway, it was a kid free home until the Zufelt Zoo moved in. This means it was set up as a kid free home, not a kid friendly one. The three stories are connected with open air stairs. You know the kind where the carpet is wrapped around a slab of wood and you can drop stuff straight through them down two stories if you aren't careful. This took countless hours to remedy when Maddie was learning to climb stairs. Brian cut a zillion pieces of custom boards to fill in each and every hole, including the triangular one open to the front door area. Before we did it, we almost lost one of the Packard kids. Luckily for us and them, we caught saw him as he was slipping his skinny little body into the hole to hang his body down one story. His big noggin just wouldn't fit through the hole, much to his chagrin. I think he totally would have jumped if he'd have gotten through (he was three years old at the time).

The stair rails are so old that my kids can go right between the vertical metal poles. I know they are 5th percentile kids, but you'd think with 90th percentile heads Ben and Maddie would be to big to fit. I can tell you why they changed the building code on stair rails. I once walked down the stairs to find Ben at 2 1/2 yrs had climbed through the rail to the open side and walked across the rail and was suspended half a story up and darn happy about his "accomplishment" while I shrieked in terror not to let go. We have wire tied baby gates and super tall dog gates to the rails and cut custom boards to fill all the holes so we don't have anyone go overboard. I can only imagine the tragedy and ambulance ride that would result. Attaching standard baby gates to the metal rails was also a feat. In the absence of a router, we borrowed a table saw and Brian ran the boards back and forth and back and forth and back and forth a million times to create a "U" shaped wood piece that could wrap around the pole and was then wire tied around the rails. Then we could drill into the wood and mount our gates. The breakfast nook has carpet under it. Nasty, nasty carpet. I'm sure it wasn't nasty before we moved in. Really. Single adult type people have always owned the house. I really believe it wasn't nasty before I moved in with my little people. But after three and a half years of spilling on that carpet under my kitchen table, I don't even want to try to clean it. It's a lost cause, really it is. Who puts carpet under a kitchen table? Someone without kids. No one else is that dumb. One thing Brian and I always knew was that our house would have to have a circle for the kids to run around. You know so you can run through the kitchen to the hall to the dining room to the living room and back to the kitchen while mom is making dinner and drive her nuts. The circle is essential to a healthy childhood. It's where we as kids went round and round and round doing all sorts of things. We played chasing games, drug our siblings on blankets trying not to whack their heads on the wall corners, rode toy horses and most importantly chased each other in wild, ferocious anger threatening to beat each other to a bloody pulp when we were fighting. All the corners of our circle have paint chips.

My Basement:

Yeah. Our house looks like kids live here now. That pristine beauty is long gone. I think back to the pictures I took of our house when we were house shopping and how amazing it was. An office and a guest room upstairs instead of two kids in one and a crib in the other room? Huge, mondo, big flat panel tv in the basement instead of all our junk and tons of toys. Another generous sized flat panel tv on the main floor with a wet bar and gorgeous furniture instead of carpet stained with carrot spit up and mud from the backyard adventures. Oh the damage we've done in the name of our children. Makes me wonder, would we have ever bought this house if it had looked then like it does now??? Hmmmm.....

The Basement Before Zufelts: