One Sock or Two?

So, I went on a wild ride to the local mall today with my daughter for a combination of a gift returns and to get milk.  (As a side note here, I find it very, very strange that Target sells milk for less than any of the three grocery stores in the city.)

My daughter is currently at an age where she doesn't like riding in the stroller anymore.  She used to love it!  Now, she just cries big crocodile tears every time we put her in it.  So, I decided to sacrifice my back for the little trip today and use the bjorn for carrying her around the mall.

Now, she's in the middle percentiles for her age- about 20lbs- but her strapped to your front, plus the diaper bag, plus the large jacket you're carrying, plus the gift returns...it's a lot of weight.  And then there's the wait (ha ha).  You walk all over the malls, just to get into some sort of crummy queue where get to watch two people standing behind the service desk chatting away.  Don't they see that there's a line?

Anyway, after a couple of stops and struggling to continue to balance it all, I make it in and out of Target with relative ease....only to be walking back to the car when a group of women stopped me to telling me that she had lost a sock- and that she was about to lose the other one.

Now, I'd been huffing and puffing by this point.  I was carrying roughly 35 extra pounds of weight for over an hour, tromping around the mall.

I was hot.

I was tired.

My back really hurt.

But I turned around and tried to retrace my steps at Target.  I thought I had made in there there with two socks, but I could have been wrong.  But after what seemed like an hour of searching (and it was probably 5 minutes), I decided that I just couldn't last anymore and dragged the whole caravan out to the car- trying desperately to keep my daughters feet covered up in the 20*F weather until I could get her to the car and a blanket.

And despite it being a commonly lost article of clothing- right up there with gloves that I like to shed like bird molts- I have been aggravated all day by the loss of that sock.  I even called the store, hoping that someone had found it.  It just figures that it was brand, brand new and not one of the cheapy socks.

I guess that teaches me to only buy the cheapy ones, because unlike the solution to my glove distribution habit, I can't have my daughter go without socks.

But the bigger thing that really bugged me is that it was only one sock.  What was it about losing one sock and not both of them like I almost did that bothered me so much?  Would I have actually felt better if she had lost the both of them?

I think, in a very strange way, I would have.  There's something about having that single sock go through the wash and have no one to ball up with when it comes time to fold it.  And then surprise you every day when you open the sock drawer you see that lone sock staring up at you as if to blame you for orphaning it.  If you lost them both, you wouldn't have that solo sock or its guilt trip.

So, now, I'm off to do the laundry.  Perhaps the sock-eating monster in the laundry will make this easy on me and finish the pair off.