Children 2B Found

I nearly lost Ellie on Saturday.

We were at an incredibly intense birthday party, in the Galleria. Friends 2B Made is, apparently, Build-A-Bear for tween girls. This party comprised 2 to 4 year-olds, not quite tweens, so this presented some challenges.

For example, most of the mamas spent the entire time hunched over nearly double, running around the store, trying to corral little girls into paying attention to the right thing at the right time. "No, not in your mouth!" is probably not something the sales clerks hear every day, but I'm sure they heard it a lot last Saturday. Ellie certainly seemed to think that the plastic curling iron looked like something that would taste good if just sucked hard enough.

At one point, Ellie and I were hanging out in the "hair salon" portion at the back of the store, while most of the other mother/daughter couples were kickin' it near the registers up front. The cashier was calling Ellie's name insistently (presumably to ring up her doll) so I left Ellie trying to sit on the doll's salon chair and went up to take care of the Visa part of the affair.

Once up front, I waited. And waited. And waited, occasionally craning my neck to try to spot Ellie in the back of the store. At one point, I told my friend Laura that I'd misplaced my daughter.

"Oh, she's back there with Vivi," Laura said, and walked to the back by the girls. I rested a little more easily, still keeping an eye on the wide open front of the store so that no little girls could sneak past me, and continued waiting.

Just as it was finally my turn to buy a fairy princess outfit for Ellie's new doll, a woman walked into the store and came up to the counter.

"There's a little girl out in the mall. She has a nametag from this store on her back, and it says Ellie."

Well, that's just about heart stopping. I ran out into the mall, and immediately I saw Ellie out on a little peninsula over where they like to flood the center of the Galleria when there's no Christmas tree or special art exhibit to be shown. She was apparently planning to go for a fun little wade, except for the nice middle-aged lady holding on to the back of Ellie's jumper.

See, it turns out that Friends 2B Made and Build-A-Bear are actually the same company. And in the spirit of corporate boundarylessness, they've connected the two stores through a small hallway in the back. So even if a mama is keeping a eye on the front of the store, her little one can still slip through the back and wander out into the mall through Build-A-Bear.

This is a good lesson for me. Not because Ellie and I spend so much time in malls and I need to watch her more closely.

No, I was starting to feel pressure to do something really cool for her third birthday in October, but I am reminded now how much I do not want to do this. Instead, we will have a traditional party here at the house, with 3 friends (and their parents) invited, complete with homemade cake and games like ring around the rosie and duck duck goose. The key is the enclosed environment. Enclosed! Like locked and child-proofed doors!

The kids probably won't rave about it at school for the next 12 months, but then again, they probably wouldn't rave about a trip to Disney World for that long, either. They're (almost) 3, after all.