Locked In! Part 1

Last Wednesday was just a typical day, well besides a fun play date with all my girlfriends but that's for another post. So a typical day, fun, naps, dinner and then church. And as always, immediately following church it was bed time.


Again, nothing out of the ordinary except that Callen was wound up after church. He was belly laughing the whole way home, either at Chase or at himself blowing bubbles. This meant that he was not ready for his normal bedtime and he needed time to wind down.


I decided to keep Callen up while I put Chase to bed. We all went up to Chase's room to read books and get jammies on. Callen was busy playing and I was over by Chase's closet, only about 8 ft from the door.


"Chase honey will you shut the door please?"


"Why mommy?"


"So your brother doesn't sneak out and fall down the stairs."


"Ok" as he is in the process of shutting the door, "I locked it mommy." Shut!


"Noooo Chase don't shut the...."


Preface: When we moved Chase to his big boy bed, goodness last March, we had to turn his door knob around so the lock was on the outside since he locked us out when it was the normal way.


The door is now shut and locked, on the outside.


This wouldn't be such a big issue except for the fact that Brad was helping Jeff farm and wouldn't be home for another hour or so. And now all three of us were locked in and who knew for how long.


But before I could figure out what I was going to do, I had to take care of business with Chase. You see, I had told him many times not to lock any doors in this house because he had locked us out of our room already. So he was punished and then it was on to business to get us out of there. 


I soon became "MacGuyver" to figure out a way to unlock the door. First thought was to take the pins out of the door because of course it would just slide out, right? Well, the first two pins came out easily and now the third, and, of course, it wouldn't budge. Now what?


I began to search the room for anything that I could use as tools, anything. My mind was going, in survival mode, more like escape mode. What I found...two wooden spoons,(hammers) a baby care kit that included fingernail scissors, (screwdriver), flip hairbrush, (pry the door open) and other random items that I thought might come in handy.


In the meantime, Callen was eating Chase's bedtime snack and drinking his milk and Chase was talking non-stop. "Mommy what are you doing? Mommy what is that? Mommy what are you going to do with that?" And on, and on, and on.


Wooden spoon..hmmmm....a hammer, yes, let's hammer out that last pin. And after many, many attempts and frustration, it finally came out. Yay! We are free! Well, at least that is what I thought until I began to try to pull the door off. Nothing. It would.not.budge.


It made sense in the beginning, until all the pins were out and I realized it was a tight fit. The door was not about to open. Now what? My oh.so.brilliant idea wasn't so brilliant after all. Super frustration.


 I decided to take a break from my amateur escape artist job to read some books. I needed to calm down and compose myself, not that I was yelling or throwing a fit, but I was getting short with Chase, probably because HE was the one who LOCKED the door.


Ok, feeling somewhat composed, the one book was a good diversion for a few minutes. Now what to do?  I can unscrew the screws on the doorknob and just take it off. Yeah, that will work. So I took the baby fingernail scissor clippers and began to unscrew the screws and it was working! It really was working. Out popped screw #1, now we just have one more and we'll be out of here...


To be continued....