First Posted: 10/23/2014

There are so many pictures of babies in my News Feed anymore that I can’t check my Facebook in public without looking like a pedophile.

Clearly, I don’t have children.

The closest thing I have to a child is my iPhone. It costs me an arm and a leg each month, wakes me up every morning and will die if it spends more than four minutes undearneath water without wearing a Life Proof device.

Like most people unable to forget the day they took their baby home from the hospital, I will never forget the day I took my iPhone home from the AT&T store. Team Blackberry for years, I decided to make the switch to the popular Apple product after realizing that it would make me look five years younger — at least in my own head it would. Once I finally made the switch, my life was changed forever. Having SnapChat and Instagram gave me a new respect for taking selfies, while Tinder motivated me to want to travel the world just so I could experience the excitement of finding a new match.

Eight months, thousands of selfies and too many Tinder matches to count later, my baby was kidnapped.

While carelessly setting my phone down for a moment inside a nightclub, someone snatched it.

It felt as if a part of me went missing.

A friend of mine recommended that I track my iPhone by signing in to iCloud and using the Find My iPhone device.

“It was stolen,” I said. “Nobody is going to return it.”

For a few days, just for wishful thinking, I decided to try and track it anyways.

Nothing.

The device wasn’t even turned on.

Since it was summertime and I knew the new version of the iPhone would be released in September, I figured I would just wait until the new one came out to replace it.

I was back using my old Blackberry. No more SnapChat, no more selfies and no more Tinder matches. Womp. Womp.

I was so depressed using my old, outdated phone that I gained ten pounds. Probably because I wasn’t motivated to look good for the selfies I was unable to take. The countdown to September couldn’t have been more ancticipated.

Three months later — and three days before the new iPhone was set to release — I receieved a phone call from a company requesting that I turn off Find My iPhone so they could sell the device.

Apparently, the person who stole my phone sold it to an ecoATM, an automated station that pays cash for phones, inside a local shopping mall.

Lucikly, after a process that lasted a month and included sending the company a copy of a police report confirming the incident, ecoATM shipped my phone directly back to me. After four months of separation, my iPhone came back to me from San Diego (the ecoATM headquarters) and was programmed in Spanish. We had a lot of catching up to do.

Now, I feel complete again. I never thought I would get my iPhone returned to me — especially not four months later. It’s kind of an Apple miracle, I suppose.