A Locked Door Mystery

The criminal duo of Bambino and Bunny has a mystery for you to solve. Put on your sleuth hats and join us for... The Case Of The Missing Diaper - a locked room mommy mystery.

Yesterday afternoon Bambino went down for his afternoon nap fully clothed and diapered. I fed the Bunny and we went down for naps too. An hour ticked by, and then the older girls came home from school, this is the signal for snack time and popsicles in our house. Bambino woke up as soon as the front door slammed, and started banging on his door.

Ever since the incident where he ran out the front door one Saturday morning while I was in the shower he's had a baby lock on the inside of his bedroom door. He can take it off, but when he's tired it's too much work. He's almost three and lazy, banging on the door until someone pays attention is easier than spending thirty seconds concentrating on pulling the lock apart... at least for him. It has something to do with being three.

Eldest let him out let Bambino free so he could come get a snack, and he came running downstairs buck naked. This is the normal state of being for a potty-training almost-three-year-old. In fact, it's normal for him to hand over a still warm diaper that soggy from use. As a veteran mommy I appreciate this stage of potty-training for it's brevity. So, no, the temporary nudity didn't bother me. What worried me was the marks on his bum that suggested that he'd done more in his diaper than just make it soggy...

I cleaned up Bambino, redressed him, handed him a snack and sent Eldest up to see how much of a mess he'd made while I took care of Bunny. Eldest came back thirty seconds later to tell me there was no diaper. I translated this to, "Diapers are disgusting! I don't want to touch it!" So I sent Miss Pink up. She too returned with a shrug.

Grumbling, I hiked upstairs to the disaster zone. I knew it was going to be a mess because I'd let three toddlers run amok unattended upstairs all morning. That meant toys were taken out but never put away. No big deal. Except it was.

The diaper was missing.

We found his short, they were clean. We found his shirt, likewise clean. But no diaper. I checked under the bed, in the closet, in his now empty drawers... nothing. The diaper was hidden somewhere under all the mess. Hidden under a pile of toys, or clothes, or blankets like a stink bomb just waiting for a stray step...

We spent the afternoon cleaning, trying to find the diaper that was smelling up the room. Here, have a look... can you guess where it was hidden?



Can you guess?

At dinner time I still hadn't found the diaper. At that point, we'd turned the room upside down, put everything away, washed the clothes, and vacuumed. The door was locked. The windows were locked. And the diaper was still missing!

And then it hit me... see that gray rectangle by the alligator in the second picture? That's the heating and air vent. A vent that lifts strait out of the floor.

Oh... yeah... he did that.

Bambino had pried up the vent, dropped his stinky diaper down into the air conditioning, and put the vent back on top. You may hand me the Worst Mommy of the Year Award, I made my husband clean that mess up. You know what's even worse? I started giggling while DH was cleaning. He looks at me. "What?"

I just grinned. "I'm going to blog about this tomorrow." :P