The Felony

So a dear non-blogging friend was reading about our camping weekend and told me that I should blog about her favorite Wandering Boy story: The Felony. I hadn't thought about it, as it happened pre-blogger in my life, but it is another example of why my hair is turning grey, and certainly worth sharing.

When the Boy was around 4 years old he was in the living room playing happily. I being blissfully still ignorant of how the wandering thing was a big issue, left him unattended for a bit while I went in the kitchen to do something. When I came back out, he was gone from the room. I looked in every room in the house, realizing that he must have gone outside somehow without me knowing. I then began yelling his name. (My neighbors are now so used to this that they have almost all stopped coming out to help me look for him anymore.) I went back in the house and searched every room again in case he had gone back inside through another door while I was on the other side of the house. After fifteen minutes I had the phone in my hand, ready to call the police, when one of the neighbor's called out to me. There was the Boy walking across the next yard over, looking completely surprised at my distress and wanting a snack.

I eventually calmed down and gave him a lecture about telling mommy if he wanted to go outside and blah blah blah. It perplexed me that I had not been able to find him nor could he tell me where he had been, but I was relieved that he was alive and let it go. Fast forward a few hours. My neighbor John comes knocking on my door after he arrives home from work. He asks if I had seen anyone hanging around his yard or house today. I hum through an answer while he goes on to tell me that he wondered if someone had tried to rob him, because the door inside his back screened porch had been standing open when he got home. And when he looked around he found a CD player on the living floor. And the television on. In every room. And the video game system pulled out of the cabinet and plugged into the television and turned on. The keyboard turned on. The stereo system turned on. Pretty much every single electronic entertainment item John owned was turned on and left out. John wonders about prowlers while I silently wonder about military school.

I did eventually confess to John that the Boy had gone missing for a time that day, and that he must have gotten into John's house. John mentioned that he leaves that porch door unlocked while he's at work so his girls can get in the house after school if they need to. I felt relieved, knowing that when you remove the Breaking from the Breaking & Entering, that the jail time would have to be reduced for this lesser offense.