The Keys to my Fridge?

We currently have two cars.  For one of them we have three keys (one for each of us and a spare).  For our other car we have only one set of keys.  We had a second set, which we lost over a year ago and we still haven't got around to replacing.  That situation is changing very soon.

I had to make a mad dash home from the shops today, after discovering that I had two sets of car keys with me - one for the car I had driven to the shops and one for the car I had left at home for the Caveman to drive to his cricket match. That's right, the car with only one set of keys.

Luckily I had finished what I was doing at the shops, so I was able to leave immediately.  Also luckily, it was early enough that he hadn't had to turn the house upside down looking for the keys just yet, but I knew I was pushing it to get there in time.  I drove with visions in my head of my man getting very grumpy because the keys weren't hanging up where they should have been and then conducting a frantic search of each room in the house, getting more panicked by the minute.

I've seen this routine before.

You can imagine my relief when I got home to a very calm husband, who actually laughed when I told him I had the keys he needed.  It turned out I had confused the time he was meant to leave and he hadn't even thought about looking for keys yet!

It reminded me though, of another time we lost the car keys.  We only had one car at the time - you guessed it, that same car with only one set of keys.  I had been shopping for groceries, come home and put the shopping away.  The car wasn't needed again until the next day - again, for cricket.  It wasn't until the Caveman was about to walk out the door to go to his match that we noticed the keys were missing.

Madness ensued .. the whole family got involved, pockets and handbags were checked, we searched the table, benches, bedrooms, under the lounges, on top of the fridge and pantry, even inside the fridge and pantry.  Finally we accepted defeat and a phone call was made to a team mate who arrived, laughing, to give my poor frazzled man a ride to cricket in his car.

I waved goodbye to them as they drove away and went back inside the house to relax.  I figured the keys would turn up once I stopped stressing about where they were - and I was right.  A little while later one of the kids asked me for an apple, which jogged my memory ... a memory of juggling three or four bags of shopping at once as I entered the house the day before (in a hurry, as always) and of absentmindedly throwing my keys into the bag of apples.  Naturally.

It's been a long-running joke in our house, as we get older, that if something is lost you should check in the fridge. All joking aside though, I would have assumed that the missing item would be in plain sight on a shelf. Not this time. I went to the fridge, pulled out the crisper drawer and opened the bag of apples - and there were the car keys.  Well chilled, but otherwise unharmed.

After my sigh of relief came the realisation that I would have to call the Caveman and own up to my mistake ... knowing that he would take pleasure in telling all the other guys in his team.  It took me a while to live down the embarrassment of that day!

It's definitely time to organise that second set of keys.