Lost

Today I lost Hayden for the first time. Well, technically he wandered away from the house. If you ask him about it, he says, "I ran away from mommy and she was sad, sad, sad without me!" No idea where he got the terminology "running away." Really, he just got so interested looking for sticks that he kept walking to find another one, and before you know it he was long gone. I got him ready to go out to the play group in the park (step out the back gate and you are in the park, literally), and told him that I was going to feed Kyra for a few minutes before we went out. When I went to get him 10 minutes later I couldn't find him anywhere. Not in the house, not in the backyard or front yard, and not in the park. I started to panic internally. Once I really realized he was gone and all of the possibilities about what could have happened to him started to sink in I began to go crazy. Hayden has played in the backyard hundreds of times before, and never once has he left my parent's property. I've started to loosen the reins a little bit and let him go out in the backyard alone and I check on him every few minutes.

Twenty minutes later my sister-in-law and I are frantically calling his name up and down the street and finally I went to the far end of the park calling his name. A lady saw me and asked who I was looking for and I told her a little boy. She said, "Hayden, right?" It turns out he went up the street and turned the corner at the end of the block. He was walking on the sidewalk and playing(this sidewalk borders the far end of the park) and the lady noticed that he didn't have an adult with him. She noticed a police car parked at the nearby mortuary so she took him over. I called and they said he was at the police station, so I made my way home to get the car to pick him up. Meanwhile, I called my mother to tell her what happened and that I was on my way to the police station to pick up Hayden. A couple of minutes later she called me back and told me that Hayden was at the high school (my mother works there in the office). Apparently when they asked Hayden about his parents he said that his daddy works at the school (although he knows he doesn't) so they took him there to try and find a parent. Obviously the dispatcher didn't tell them I called and was going to come get him. When they asked him his name he said Hayden Wells, but when they asked his daddy's name he said Dax and it is such an uncommon name that they didn't understand him and kept thinking he was still saying dad. Anyway, the principal is in our ward and recognized him as well.

Hayden didn't cry at all the entire time! He was pretty emotionally drained after the incident (so was I) though. No more play time for Hayden outside without Mommy for a LONG TIME, even with locks on the gates. It will probably take a good year or two for my nerves to settle down. I don't even want to know what Dax is going to say when I get a hold of him...

Thank goodness for good people in the world and for a merciful Heavenly Father who answers the prayers of a mother who has been a little too careless.