I’m a chronic wallet loser.

My wallet is small and I spend at least half my life wondering where it is and then finding it tucked into some “convenient” crevice or lost under the car seat. It’s been mentioned to me (in what I like to think of as more of a loving manner and less of a what-kind-of-moron-are-you manner) that I should carry a purse instead, so that it wouldn’t be able to hide on my so easily.  But I’ve never liked carrying purses. Not only do I fill them with stuff that I don’t need to carry around but then I have to  carry it around. And while it’s true that I lose my small pocket-sized wallet on a regular basis, it usually turns up somewhere on the property. Purses, in my brief experiment with them, get left behind in other places – much worse.

This time, my wallet had been gone for over a month and I was starting to worry. Not about identity theft or the fact that my check cards could be in the hands of an unsavory character. No, I was worried that I was going to have the face the music and head to the DMV for a new driver’s license. Visions of long lines, crabby government employees, crabby children, inconvenient hours and most of all, a crabby me, were dancing in my head. But even my fear of the DMV was slowly getting overcome by the inconvenience of not having a wallet (which is not as hard as it seems, so long as you know where you husband’s wallet is) and I set a deadline. I decided that if the snowbanks melted in the driveway and my wallet wasn’t to be found frozen at the bottom that, I would have to start to replace things. Which means, of course, the DMV. Things were looking dire indeed.

Then today I was scrummaging around the house looking for baby wipes. It was either find the wipes or get the bathtub going.  And I didn’t really have time to bathe the baby before we headed out the door.  So I was checking everywhere. Everywhere eventually included the diaper bag.  Some of you would have, perhaps, checked your diaper bags earlier but this is my diaper bag and it’s usually not worth bothering with when it comes to finding actual useful items.

Diaper bags fall securely into the “bags I don’t want to carry” category. Over the years I have learned that those molded pockets in the door of the truck work great for holding a few diapers, as does my jacket pocket. A box of wipes really just fits better loose on the floor of the truck than crammed in the top of a diaper bag getting in the way of the actual diapers, and children suffer no ill effects from a drive home in nothing but a diaper if things have gone seriously awry. Not to say that I don’t use my diaper bag, I just don’t use it unless I have to.  Now, after six years of use, it’s zipper doesn’t close, a mouse chewed a hole in it, the strap has a large knot tied in it because the plastic doohickey that held it all together broke and it rarely leaves the house, much less gets packed with the variety of useful items I see in other mothers’ diaper bags. So, you can imagine my surprise when I opened it up to find that it did indeed have a package of wipes, a single diaper and when, on a sudden flash of inspiration, I looked in the front pocket – my wallet!

Saved from the DMV by a poopy diaper!