Beck Vass: How many hours have you lost looking for kids' toys?

"She also grew attached to a small pink ping-pong ball swiped from her grandmother's house. She took this ball everywhere for months. She even slept with it." Photo / Getty Images

When you are a parent you spend a lot of time looking for things. I mean A LOT of time.

Often it's things you had in your hand seconds earlier like your car keys, or your wallet, or phone.

Sometimes it's an item you're sure you had not long ago… or was that yesterday? Or last week?

Often, you're searching for the same thing. Multiple. Times. A. Day.

Our daughter, five, has "Dwinnie" (her blankie), and our son, three, has Bunny.

A quick calculation of the time I have spent looking for Dwinnie and Bunny (guessing at about five minutes most days for the past two years), reveals that I have lost about 60 hours of my life looking for this stuff.

Once, when our daughter was two, she also became smitten with a tiny finger puppet duck my mum gave her. I spent days looking for it. I was baffled. I am thorough. A champion finder of lost goods. The duck was nowhere to be found.

Weeks later, I used the double-ended oven mitt slung over the oven handle and pulled my hand out suddenly, having felt something inside. Out came the quirky little duck.

What hope is there for parents when a child puts something in the oven mitt slung over the oven?

She also grew attached to a small pink ping-pong ball swiped from her grandmother's house. She took this ball everywhere for months. She even slept with it. Every time we went anywhere, we had to take The Pink Ball and Dwinnie.

One day, The Pink Ball went missing.

We looked everywhere over and over and eventually gave up, figuring it would remain one of life's enduring mysteries. No other pink ball would compare.

My mum, dedicated to such matters in a way that I am not, searched for miles and eventually found a six-pack of pink ping-pong balls. They did not have the little soccer ball pattern that The Pink Ball had.

About two years (some holidays, a house move and another child) later, I was packing to go away somewhere and checked the front pockets of my suitcase, where I found The Pink Ball.

Our girl has spent nights sleeping with cars, books, and a revolting light-up Halloween skull light my husband bought at the supermarket.

The other night, I went to check the kids in bed and I found my son asleep with a stack of toys all around him.

Cars, a torch, soft toys, a Tupperware Shape-O – all up I think I counted about 12 toys around him.

As I put them away, I pulled his covers up. Then I saw it. In his hand as he slept was The Pink Ball.

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