Finders keepers

This morning Benjamin couldn't find his...

• pants
• home-reading book
• socks
• shoes
• jacket
• jacket (again)

And he left his lunchbox at school again so will, yet again, be visiting the lost and found. 

The items he was missing this morning were subsequently found...

• in his dresser (the issue, specifically, was that he hates wearing jeans and only ever wants to wear sweat pants but only had jeans in his drawer; we should probably get him more sweat pants)
• by the television (where he also found the Humphrey book he's been reading (in a whole stack of books sitting there))
• in his drawer (shocker)
• in his shoe box (the issue, specifically, was that he'd jumped into the river when we went hiking on Saturday and his shoes were still too wet to wear out in this cold weather so we had to find a different pair of shoes but then we could only find one shoe of his back up pair because the other shoe was in Grandma and Grandpa's shoe box)
• on the couch upstairs (after lamenting, "Why is the couch all full of stuff again?!" because he'd cleaned it off the other day (the answer to that question was, "Because you guys cleaned off the bottom stair yesterday by putting everything on the couch instead of putting anything away!")
• on his head (he'd put the hood on his head and was walking around with the rest of it flapping behind him like a cape and when I asked him to put it all the way on he ran to the coat rack and panicked because he couldn't find his jacket)

"It is on your head," I seethed as calmly as I could. 

He also whined this morning about how he's not allowed to take books from home to school (his sisters, on the other hand, get to do it all the time). I pointed out that he's also not allowed to take school library books home (first graders (or grade oners)) have to keep them in their desks at school. I then pointed out that we'd spent the entire morning searching for things that he'd misplaced (or simply didn't look for long enough to find) so having him cart books around from three different sources would be a disaster. 

Taking his home-reading book back and forth between school and home is plenty responsibility for him!