walkabout

As a child I was a bit of a wanderer. Probably one of the stories most associated with me was when I wandered away from my house at three years old. Apparently without telling anyone what time I'd be back. I mean, really. No sense of responsibility whatsoever. My sister says she remembers running down the driveway (she was seven) and a little way up and down the street as all our neighbours - and obviously my parents - were looking for me.

I'm not sure how long I was gone in total, but a nice lady many blocks away from my house finally noticed me pootling along and brought me in and called the police. The favourite part of the story according to my parents was my arrival home in the back of a police car, munching a cookie from the nice lady.

As a toddler, Sweetpea was also a wanderer. On vacations with my family, my mother would say "she's gone walkabout" as we watched her head off to investigate her surroundings, and we would all laugh at how she was taking after me in more ways than one (the moseying, the hollering, and later the rolling of eyes....).

What goes around comes around.

She is a great kid, mostly easy to reason with, and over the years she has learned that when we are out, she needs to respond immediately if she is out of my sight and I call her name. I've always given her quite a lot of freedom, within my line of vision.

On Saturday, we slipped up.

After breakfast, she was eager to spend some money on a new toy which she had enjoyed at a friend's house. We counted it out from her piggy bank and were going to head to the store later.

She got dressed and with her little cupcake purse over her shoulder, headed down the stairs to our carport saying she was going to the store. We waved at her jokingly from the window, thinking she was playing a game, expecting her to come back up in a few minutes. She often goes down to check the mailbox (with one of us keeping her in view). This time, we didn't keep her in view.

About ten minutes later English hubby asked if she was with me. At that point, he had already called her name out the window and drove around the block once in his car. No, she wasn't with me.

We went instantly into search mode - he again jumped in the car to search the neighbourhood, I called our closest neighbours to see if she had knocked on their door or they had seen her walk by. Neither of us panicked, we were calm. How far could she have gone? I refused to think about worst-case scenarios.

After 30 minutes we still hadn't found her and I called the police. My husband went running up the hiking trail around the corner where we spend a lot of time on the weekends. I had also called a couple of families in our neighbourhood to get them on the alert. One of our mom friends from Sweetpea's school jumped on her bike and joined the search, as did our neighbour two doors down.

The police had three cruisers in our neighbourhood within three minutes, plus a park ranger starting to search the trails near our house. Later we found out a search plane was ready to take off. They don't mess around when a child is missing.

Our mom friend on the bike is the one who ultimately found Sweetpea. She was walking back toward a local park where she thought she would take a break before coming back to the house to get a jacket. She was cold. Our friend put Sweetpea on the back of her bike to bring her home, and English hubby met them halfway.

We gave her many hugs and kisses, told her we loved her, apologized for giving her the impression that it was okay for her to go out on her own, and then grounded her for a week.

And although we were calm and pragmatic throughout, later that afternoon we felt exhausted and realized the anxiety and underlying emotions had taken their toll.

All is well, and it definitely afforded us a great teaching opportunity about many issues which can probably go without saying.

Not only for her, but us too.