if found, please return to owner

if you see me walking on the road, you will recognise me. you know why? because (yes, yes, i know we are not suppose to start a sentence with a conjunction but we are living dangerously in this blog. yawn!) i am labelled. labelled? yes, as in there is a sticker on me somewhere identifying what or who i am.

everything in our house is labelled. well, everything that gets to leave the house, anyway. you won't see our hamsters being labelled because technically they don't get to leave the house. i am not talking about pokey, the escape artist, of course. he just disappeared, and since the only way out for him out of the 25 storey balcony is dooooown, i figured he basically commited suicide. so, it was a good thing that we didn't label the hamsters, otherwise the management office will be calling me up to identify bodies and remove splattered hamster pieces.

actually, everything in our house that belongs to batman is labelled. okay, there are many things in the house that are labelled which do not belong to the little batman but that stems from my o.c.d., which is another topic altogether, so we ignore those for the moment. so, all his possessions are labelled because batman is in the habit of losing things. from clothings, stationeries, water bottles to books. i am surprised that he has managed to come home everyday with his underwear on. i am not jesting. there are underwears and shoes in the lost and found department of his school. it's a 'boy' thing, i realise, to lose track of possessions. it's costing me though, to keep buying new ones to replace the missing. he can come home without books, without sharpeners, without p.e. clothes, without food containers, without jackets and when you ask him what happened to them, he will just shrug and say he lost it. such nonchalance, such carefree abandon, as if he is a monk unaware of materialistic possessions.

so, we go around writing and sewing his names into little things, short of his underwear of course. if he lost his underwear, while wearing it, the underwear will be the last thing i am worried about. it all looks very posh and classy, i've got my name printed on all my things, ooooooo..., all very upper-class monogram feel, don't you think? but there is the untold story of one mother's frustration, who has to keep handing over cold hard cash to replenish these items. sometimes i wonder where all these missing items go. to the big heaven of little boys' forgotten things up above? i'll bet if i go browsing around, i'll come back with a vanful.

remedy? can't possibly keep screaming and shouting at him each time, i don't have the energy to keep up. especially since, (in a hushed conspiracy voice) i think it's an inherent genetical fault. *cough* tried making the little one pay for it from his allowance money. do you know how much a jacket wipes out a 8-year-old boy's allowance for months and months to come? after the loss of one expensive item, the second one seems to pale by comparison. how many future months of allowance can you take away from him? no allowance until you are 68 years old?

so, i'm adopting a defeatist stance. that's why i'm not taking a chance on getting myself lost. i'm labelled, to be on the safe side. i'm mummy, please return to owner if found.