Never Underestimate A Two Year Old
As usual it was a great Saturday family day. We went downtown to the city as we always do when the weather is nice, walked around, went to the beach, stopped for lunch on the way back to the car and got home with enough time to let the kids play in the newly fenced part of the Tomchak Estate. But it’s that last part where the problems began.
After being outside close to an hour with the boys and Sydney we started to bring them into the house since it was past their bedtime and they still needed baths. While Brenda was holding Sydney and trying to convince Andrew why going in the house was a good thing, I carried Max into the house through the kitchen door that connects to the garage. I plopped him on the floor in the kitchen, made sure that the basement door was locked and pulled the kitchen door closed behind me.
Brenda and Sydney were about 20 feet away from me as I pulled the door closed and we swapped places as she went to take Sydney into the house and I headed for the yard to continue negotiations with Andrew.
That was mistake number 1. Never leave a 2 year old on the other side of a door that can be locked.
As I passed Brenda I joked “I hope he doesn’t lock us out!”. And only seconds later Brenda was yelling from the garage that indeed, we were locked out. There are two locks, one on the handle and a deadbolt. Max had turned the deadbolt.
Over the next 30 seconds we realized the following in rapid succession. We did not have house keys on us, the hidden set from the garage was missing (and probably had been for a long time), there were no keys in the vehicles, and we had no cell phones on us to call anyone for help.
So I start to talk to Max through the door and ask him to unlock the door. We can hear him on the other side playing with the lock and babbling so I’m feeling somewhat confident that if he locked it he can unlock it. I hear him playing with it and as I’m turning the door knob back and forth I hear a click – and now the bottom handle is locked too. The likelihood of him unlocking both and letting us back in seems rather unlikely now.
Now Brenda is kind of, shall we say – losing her mind. She looks through the kitchen window to see what he’s up to but can’t see much because the counters are taller than he is. Since it’s now clear that we are helpless to fix this situation alone I decide to run to the neighbors house and see if we can use someones phone to call 911, not really knowing what the police can do.
I went to 3 different houses and nobody was home (or I looked to crazy to answer the door). As I was getting ready to go to a fourth there were two women walking down the street with their dogs and I ran up to them and asked if either had a cell phone I could use to call 911. One of them did and she handed it to me.
As I was on the phone with the police, luck finally turned our way a bit and a police car was coming down the street. I waved the officer down and explained the situation quickly through the passenger side window. She explained that she could help but the only thing the police can do is break down the door. Now it was a matter of choosing what door to break down. Great!
This is not our actual house, in case you were wondering.
The officer comes up to the house and we start to discuss what doors to break down. I wanted to do the garage/kitchen door since it’s in the garage and nobody would see the door damaged. But that door is a strong metal door, so we start looking at the front door. The inside front door is open, but the outside screen door is locked. At this point you might be wondering why we did just jerk open the screen door and go into the house. We tried! It’s not the typical screen door, and is made even better than we thought. I pulled on it with all my weight and force only to have the handle start to bend, which would do no good.
Then the officer had a good idea. If we could get the top glass pane down (it’s a sliding glass top) we could just cut through the screen and unlock the door. So that’s what I did, and less than a minute later I had the door open and ran into the kitchen. What I found was Max standing on the kitchen chair and sipping diet coke out of a McDonalds cup. This is of course a nice treat for him since we don’t give the kids pop.
So all is well that ends well, but it was a pretty uncomfortable situation to be in and we are trying to take some lessons away from it.
Lessons Learned
- Never walk outside without keys to the house if the house is left empty, even if the doors are unlocked.
- If you ignore the first rule, have extra keys available in other locations. We now have 3 extra sets of keys hidden in various locations that only we know the location of (and no, it’s not one of those “key rocks” so don’t come over and look).
- Keep your cell phone in your pocket when going out to play in the yard. It was very rare that I didn’t have mine, and it was only because my phone was dead from using it all day in the city.
- Never underestimate what a child can do. It never occurred to me for a second that Max would lock the door on us. I won’t make that mistake again!
Thanks for keeping things interesting Max, but don’t do it again!
