This story might be a little scary for some of my readers. Feel free to turn on a couple of extra lights, grab a blanket, call your SO over to hold your hand. Some of you like scary things, and that’s OK too – there’s enough room in this blog for everyone.

Ready?

We lost the remote to the Tivo.

Oh, the horror, the horror! It started Saturday around lunchtime. My five six year old fell asleep on the couch, watching Animal Planet, holding the remote in his hand like a teddy bear. All was good – Animal Planet is usually ok for anybody to watch (especially during the day), we were busy elsewhere in the house. No worries.

Then? His big brother wanted to watch a movie. On DVD. So (for reasons known only to him) he took the remote and wandered out of the room. Why? We’ll never know. He’s more than a little ADD so by the time we discovered the remote was missing, not only had he not picked a movie to watch, but he had been in every room in the house at least seven times. There was no sign of it anywhere.

We were ok, for a while. We’re used to finding the remote in funny places – the bathroom. The garage. Mostly because my son likes to carry it around with him (so nobody can change the channel while he is gone). I can hear some of you shaking your heads and saying “typical male,” and you’re probably right. This behavior drives my wife batty.

Anyway, after an hour of casually looking around, it hadn’t turned up in the usual spots. We started to panic. We were looking in drawers, under beds. “Did you check the baby’s closet? YES. TWICE.” etc. It wasn’t in the medicine cabinet, or the dishwasher. Not with the cat food. Not outside on the porch. “Maybe the dog took it?” “I looked already.”

Meanwhile, our Tivo sat there, occasionally flashing the orange light that meant it was recording something, but we couldn’t tell what – we were powerless without the remote. (aside: yes, you can do some limited functions using the buttons on the front of the unit, but nothing, nothing I tell you, can replace the penis peanut shape in your hand and the ability to surf commercials. Nothing).

Saturday night, we settled for watching Nanny McPhee on disc. Sunday morning, no TV at all – we ate breakfast and went to church, to pray for the return of the remote.

Then, we did the unthinkable: we cleaned the house, hoping to find it. But it was not to be.

In our darkest hour, with another afternoon of commercials stretching ahead of us, we did what any good American Consumer would do – we bought another Tivo.

Just kidding! Yes, I know you can buy remotes. Even DirecTV Tivo remotes. But hey, we had talked about getting another Tivo for the bedroom, and this seemed like a perfect excuse. So our dear friend Ebay found us one, and soon we’ll have many hours of Tivo-licious viewing to keep us from ever having sex again.

An hour later, of course, my son (the child who lost it in the first place), found the remote. It was buried in the sleeper sofa in the living room, deep down between the guts. There is no television in that room. Mystery…

And last night we rocked to the Cleavage Cheetah Girls. 2.