“Anna is missing.” Ben’s blond hair shone in the sunlight. For the briefest of moments, I thought I misheard him. Looking up quizzically I waited while he repeated himself. “Anna is missing.”

Jumping up, I tucked my youngest back into her stroller. She was crying now. Upset by the disturbance to her nursing.

“Where is Stephen?” I asked about his brother.

“With Mom.”

Clearly not, I looked around. “Where is your brother and sister?”

“Stephen is with Dad, but we can’t find Anna.” He said.

I took in the crowd. Easily five hundred people where at the churches annual fireworks show. Somewhere in the crowd of five hundred people was my husband, my five-year-old, and my three-year-old. Only, according to my oldest child, they weren’t all together.

I pushed the stroller through the crowd. Ben in tow. Off to the right, there was the bounce house, and the food. My husband had taken the kids to play on the bounce houses while I nursed the baby. I was frantically looking for her, while keeping an eye out of security or someone with a church shirt on. Someone who could help us find her.

Anna isn’t like my other two. She has some of the personality traits similar to Ben her oldest brother, but she is completely different from Stephen, even though they have less than two years between them. While Ben is extremely outgoing, smart and funny, and Stephen is quiet, reserved, and shy, Anna is precocious, she also isn’t afraid of anyone or anything.

She is the kind of child who talks to everyone. Trusts everyone. For the first time in my life, I realized just how dangerous that could be. I could see her getting into a car with a stranger. She is the kind of child, I feared, who could be easily led away.

“My daughter is missing. My three-year-old.” I told the woman in the bright orange church shirt, “She is wearing a pink shirt, and blue jeans.” I tried to remember if there was anything more distinctive about her appearance I could tell the woman. I still hadn’t found my husband or other son. I didn’t know if he already reported her missing. Crowds swirled around me. A sea of faces and none of them my sweet child’s.

“We will find her,” the lady assured me, her hand coming down to rest on my wrist which was still sitting on the handle bars of the stroller. Before she could pull out her walkie talkie and make a full report I saw her brown hair bobbing out of the crowd, ear to ear grin on her face. She was having the time of her life, not knowing that her parents were frantically searching for her.

Since that day last July, I have actively taken to sharing a message with my three older children. First, is that they must know our full names. Their full names, and mine and my husband. Before that we would chide them if they called us by our given names instead of Mom and Dad. Since then we have encouraged it.

Next, I have talked to them about different steps they can take if they are lost suddenly in a crowd of people. Who to ask for help. Where to go. What to do. All things that we have probably covered more than once with them in the past, but since that day things I have drilled into them.

If they get separated from us at an event, find an adult, wearing a logo tee-shirt for the event. Tell them their name, our name, and that they are lost. Look for a police officer or firefighter. Find a store associate if we are out shopping.

My daughter now four calls me Rachel all the time, and I am perfectly okay with it. Not because I am some new age mom that wants to be her friend, but because I don’t want her to panic and forget when she is lost. I don’t want her to worry that she will be in trouble for calling me by my name when asked who her Mom is.

I still live with a fear that her fearlessness will someday get her into trouble. But I feel a little bit better knowing that because I’ve told her time and again that it’s okay to call me Rachel, if she is ever lost in the crowd again she will feel okay with telling people her mom is Rachel Woodruff, and hopefully she won’t stay lost for very long.