So your curiosity got the best of you and you’re reading this blog post to find out why I had a sock in my mailbox?  It’s the same reason I get chased out of stores and frequently approached by complete strangers.  The answer: because babies and socks are often like oil and water; they have a tendency to separate!

At first, my son had no interest in his socks.  People tried to warn me what was to come.  Like the woman who said in passing one day, “both socks still there,” as if giving the report for a regularly scheduled sock check.  I used to just smile and nod at all of the sock commentators, thinking to myself, “Little do they know, my little genius knows that his socks are best kept on his feet.”  Well, all that has changed and now the least likely place to find his socks is on his feet.

So, back to the sock in my mailbox.  It was being returned by a friend we recently visited.  I realized before we left that we were missing a sock, but despite her house being immaculately clean and devoid of clutter, the sock was nowhere to be found.

In another recent sock incident, we were shopping at our Friends of the Library bookstore.  We had various conversations with several of the volunteers about babies and socks.  I even verified (I thought) that we had both of my son’s socks before we left, only to realize three blocks later that we were missing a sock!  We returned to the bookstore where the sock was waiting for us.  One of the volunteers, a grandmother herself, said she tried chasing after us when she found the sock, but it was too late.

There are some upsides to our ongoing sock saga.  We get extra exercise when we backtrack to retrieve a lost sock.  We make new friends when strangers approach us to return our latest escapee.  The state of my son’s socks and his progress in getting them off is a great conversation starter (if I took off my socks in the middle of the bank it would garner a completely different response).  In the case of the sock that sparked this blog post, it got me some mail.  Real mail, with a note from a friend.  Not only did I get back a sock I was bummed about losing, but I got a piece of mail that wasn’t a  bill or something to dump straight into the recycling bin and that was a total day booster.