I had the ultimate bad mama moment today. Worse than the time I let him eat M&Ms for breakfast. Worse than the time I let him wear the same shirt for 3 days because he screamed every time I tried to take it off. Worse than when he started sayinf 'shit' all day long. "What could you have done", you might ask, "when you are normally the paragon of perfect mothering?".

I lost Henry in Walmart. Yup. We were standing in line at the fabric cutting counter (which is the only reason I would go to Walmart-where else can you get fabric and soybeans without having to leave the building?) behind an impossibly old woman buying 13.25 yarns of the most hideous grey polyester fabric I have ever seen, while her equally old husband kept bringing other bolts of equally horrid fabric up to get her opinion on it. Henry was happily playing with a box full of buttons, so I was watching the drama of this transaction unfold before me. I turned around a minute later and he was gone. Gone, gone, gone. I asked the pair of old ladies behind me if they had seen which way he went and they pointed across the aisle. Here I stop for a Public Service Announcement:

If you are EVER in a store standing in a line and you see a distracted mother not notice her young child wandering off...SAY SOMETHING!!!

Anyway, I ran in the direction that they pointed in and the younger of the two ladies went a different direction to help me look for him. I suspect she felt a twinge of guilt for just watching him walk away from me. He must have been gone for about a minute and a half, two minutes tops. In that 2 minutes, all I could think of was Adam Walsh and how long I should look before I told them to lock the doors and not let anyone leave until I found him. I was trying to remember if I saw a "Code Adam" sign on the door when we came in and couldn't remember. Finally (this was a long 2 minutes, dammit) I ran down an aisle and found Henry sitting on the ground, happily playing with a ride on toy. I picked him up and hugged him and made him ride in the cart for the rest of the trip. When I got back to my place in line, they guy in front of me shook his head like "how could you lose your kid you moron", and I almost clocked him one with a bolt of neon green fake fur. Ass.

To make up for my bad mothering, I took him to Barnes and Noble and let him play with the big train table and all of the books that sing and make obnoxious noises.

*sigh*