Chalice is Joel’s devoted little disciple…some of the time. Henry’s health food store kindly bestowed balloons upon my children this morning when I was grocery shopping and Joel saw to it that his sister kept her purple balloon and didn’t “drop” it. He alternately asked me to tie and untie his yellow balloon to his sandal. The balloons safe inside our house late this afternoon, I was fixing dinner around the 5 o’clock hour with happy music blasting to dissuade the kids from remembering their hungry little stomachs and their duty to fuss the hour away before their daddy arrived home. They glued themselves to my ankles while I chopped and prepared the components of chicken pot pie. It was then that Joel let go of his yellow balloon and much to his dismay it floated swiftly to the top of our new skylight. I tried unsuccessfully to retrieve it for him and told him that when daddy arrived home, he would get the balloon for him. Joel fixated on that point of Daddy getting his balloon for him. When the kids temporarily left me to dinner preparations, I hardly noticed. A few moments later, I left the kitchen to check on the kids and noticed both doors were wide open. Joel knew how to spring the child safety door handle from the screen door with the larger door. He also knew how to unbolt all three of the locks and had obviously done so quite effectively. Joel and Chalice were nowhere to be seen. I rushed down the sidewalk to the left. A few neighbors asked if I was looking for someone. Two lone toddlers would certainly have drawn some attention I would have thought. Another neighbor from her balcony informed me that they had gone around the corner. As I rushed the opposite direction she explained that they’d said something about finding daddy. Great, I thought. So she took a baby’s word for it! They were nowhere to be seen around the corner either. They’d both passed four neighboring doors walked down several stairs to where David’s truck would have been parked had he been home. As I rounded the corner of our garage I saw the two miniature people. Chalice’s purple balloon was tied to her pink corduroy overall dress. She held the two halves of the child safety doorknob thing. Joel was by her side as they ventured onward. They were nearly outside of our complex and in rush-hour traffic on the street. In fact, another 20 seconds in the direction they were headed and hopefully God’s mercy would have spared them from the rush of cars heading home. Is mothering worth the near heart-attacks it so frequently affords? Is there insurance to cover the fees for the number of guardian angels my little ones could use?