Maybe green poop isn't so bad after all.

This was the thought I had Tuesday afternoon.

Rewind a few hours. It was an uncharacteristically nice late winter day. I'd just gotten back from a couple hours of kid-free time, so I was in a good mood. And I had primroses to plant. So I took the kids outside. In the past, taking the kids outside and getting yard work done were somewhat of a contradiction unless they were in our little pen with the door to the house locked. However, the pen has been disassembled to make way for a bigger pen (by "pen" I mean "small fenced area outside our back door that was once a dog run but now is just there so I can get the kids outside without having to accompany them"). No problem though, right? Because the older kids are responsible now, and Mariah follows Shiloh around, and Esther sticks close to the house.

At one point I ran in to get my camera, and then spent some time taking pictures of Essie...I've been bad about taking pictures of late, since they all have dark backgrounds and half aren't correctly focused (not my fault). So we were overdue. Then spring fever started to bite, and I decided to take some pictures of "signs of spring" for a layout. I take about 5, and then turn around.

Esther's gone.

I quickly scan the front yard, she's not here. I peek through the gate to the backyard as I'm running out to the road, nothing. She's not in the road either, or near the road. She's nowhere. I get Shiloh to start looking around the yard--which of course is useless, because I don't trust her, and if she says Essie isn't in the backyard, I still have to go look back there. I'm getting more and more frantic by the minute. I'm running around the neighbors backyards, looking up and down the road, around the corner, wondering if I should run down to the playground. A neighbor drives up and says he hasn't seen her. He offers to drive around the block and look. I decide that I'll call the police if he comes back empty-handed.

I circle through the backyards again, finally deciding that I should call her, because even though she won't come, someone might hear me calling...and another neighbor asks if I'm looking for a little girl. She's safe and, of course, completely oblivious that anything might be wrong. I thank her, wait for the other neighbors to get back so they know she's ok, and we go home.

And that afternoon, when she removed her diaper during naptime and I had to go in her room and clean up a yucky mess, I thanked God for the mess to clean up. It's so much better than the alternative.

Here she is 5 minutes before I wondered if I'd lost her forever: