Downtime.

There are some nights when Matt and I just look at each other and know we are due for one of my all-time favorite activities: eating on the couch.

Oh yeah, I'm talking about making some high-crumb snacks, killing the lights, turning on a non-animated movie, and going numb while we watch big people on our small tv. No Wiggles, no Snow White, and absolutely nothing PG. We can eat in the living room AND watch grown-up things AND stay up late. We can watch Jack Black fart all night long if we really want to! One of those nights where your brain is whimpering, Help! It's dark in here.

This is now a fairly good date night when you've crossed that line into adulthood. I knew I had first crossed it some years ago when I willingly went to bed earlier on a Saturday night than I had the five days preceding it. Because I was tired. And I was tired not from staying up too late the night before because we were all over downtown tripping the light fantastic, drinking martinis and eating tapas, you know, just being generally young and fabulous. I was tired from that big shopping trip I took to the Super-Walmart after dropping the kids off at school. So yeah, there was no going back.

On the night in question, I was ready to pop the popcorn. But, perhaps feeling a bit guilty about all the extra butter and salt I was most definitely going to drench that lite-popcorn in, I decided to eat a grapefruit first in hopes it might carry some good nutritional karma into my gut before the upcoming shock-and-awe campaign. But first...the knife!

Wait, where's the knife?

Ok, seriously. The sharpest serrated knife I own is easy to spot as it has a bright red handle among the black handled knives. Why am I not seeing the knife? Matt, do you see the knife?

Matt does not see the knife. This is a pressing issue. One cannot lose a very sharp knife in a house with children who are hell-bent on maiming Barbies in the name of playing doctor. And so, the interrogation begins.

It is now 10:15 on a Wednesday night, and any hope of relaxing on the couch while eating on autopilot is fading with each passing minute. We go into Nat's room and try to wake her up.

Natalie, did you see the red knife?
Yeah. {snore}
Natalie, where is the red knife?
It's... {snore}
Natalie, where is the red knife??
It went poof. {snore}
Natalie, where is the red knife?!?
Daniel snatched it from me. {snore}

Into Dan's room.
Daniel, have you seen the red knife?
{snore} Natalie did it. {snore}

I can now understand how children can convince themselves of experiencing something that never happened after we pressed Natalie some more. There was a good 30 minutes where we took her downstairs and questioned her about the location of the knife, and it became more obvious that she had no idea what the red knife even was or where it was hiding. But she didn't want to let on.

Where did you put it after you took it to your room?
Umm, I put it under my bed. But it's not there anymore; it went poof.
Where did it go poof to after it was under your bed?
Then it went into Daniel's room under his bed. But it's not there anymore; it went poof.
Where did it go poof to after it was under his bed?
Then it went downstairs onto the couch. But it's not there anymore; it went poof...

(You can probably guess that the knife walked all over the house before it "poofed" into another location. And these locations were all places we had previously asked her about.)

Channeling my best David Caruso, I dramatically lowered my figurative sunglasses and told Natalie the police were going to come and take us away unless we found that knife. She seemed mildly upset by this, but not nearly enough to tell me the location of the knife, if in fact she might have known where it was at all. So, once I added that she would be taken away to live in another house (horrible parenting skillz, I know! But it was almost midnight and my judgment was lackluster, at best), her face crumpled up into the most pathetic thing I've ever seen, even in a Hallmark movie. She admitted she had no idea where it was but begged us to find it before the police came.

We put Nat back in her bed, and after ransacking the house for two hours, decided to check the trashcan. It was the only place it could be. And there we were, both in our pajamas and chemo gloves, in the middle of the night, rifling through crap that had been marinating in the outside trashcan for a few days, in search of this damn knife. In the garage. When it was 19 degrees outside. And guess what? It was just as gross as you might guess. And no sign of the knife.

We called it quits and went to bed. So much for a relaxing night-in.

The first thing Nat did when she woke up was run to Dan's room and say, "We have to find the knife before the police take Mommy and Daddy away!"

And Daniel responded, "What knife?"

It's now been four nights since the knife went missing, and luckily no one has been hurt or taken away by the police. It's quite the unsolved mystery. Paging the ghost of Robert Stack...the knife is untouchable! (There's a two-fer for you.)

Well, at the insistence of my mother, we went out to a movie last night. Pro: we got to leave the house. Con: we had to wear real clothes instead of pajamas. But, Avatar in 3D was completely amazing and well worth the first hour of the movie I spent trying not to throw up. This was a movie of the future, while the Walk, Do Not Run warning before the film started was clearly from 1990. Maybe they keep that old thing around to make each movie seem extra modern in comparison, no matter how many times Jennifer Aniston remakes the same romantic comedy.

As the credits rolled, the gentleman next to me started to wax poetic about how unrealistic the military's tracking software (OF THE FUTURE) was. Because the other stuff about the 10-foot tall blue creatures who fly on mountain banshees was apparently spot-on.