Wanted: Proof of Life

Does anybody have a time machine I can borrow?

I need it to travel back to last , when I last saw my children’s birth certificates. I knew exactly where they were at that point, when we reorganized what was designed to be an eat-in kitchen into a play zone for the kids.

We swapped a rickety utility shelf from Ikea that for years was used to store cookbooks and miscellaneous important papers with two toy shelves from Pottery Barn Kids. The old Ikea shelf was home to a stack of kid-related paperwork, including all the papers and bills we amassed during my second pregnancy and both the kids’ birth certificates. When I sorted through all the papers and put them away to make room for the toy shelves, I remember feeling quite proud of myself for taking on a project that would simplify and streamline the townhouse-sized existence of our family of four.

Why is it that I can clearly remember the feeling of satisfaction given to me by the hoeing out process, yet I have only a vague idea where the oh-so important birth certificates wound up? I think they are in the basement somewhere in a stack of other important papers, because the basement is where important things seem to go to get lost.

In my mind’s eye, I can see the kelly green folder given to me by a nurse at the doctor’s office during my first when I was around six weeks pregnant with my son. That was back in fall 2009 and I managed to hold onto it for nine months and then some, but now it is eluding me among the Christmas decorations, stacks of books and half-deflated beach balls and rafts that are living in subterranean limbo.

I know I can easily reorder copies of the birth certificates from the state online, but I don’t want to pay the fee and I’m under something of a : I need to have my daughter’s birth certificate with me next week when the two of us head to the airport to fly to Denver to visit my brother and his family for a long weekend. I know that the new copy of the birth certificate would never arrive in time for our trip.

And so, I’ll be spending the weekend in the basement, looking high and low for papers that prove my children exist and are mine, and wondering how someone could be irresponsible enough to lose documents and yet also responsible for