Locked Out!

A lot of readers (if I still have any?!?) have probably already heard this story, but I wanted to document it for the blog because it's a good one!

A couple of weekends ago when it was nice and sunny and warm, Matt and Annie and I spent the morning outside... walking the neighborhood, taking Annie for wagon rides, etc. It was a lilttle past noon and Annie was getting hungry so we headed back inside our house via the garage. There's a few steps leading from the garage to the house and so I picked Annie and set her inside the house. She just stood there fiddling with something for a few seconds while I talked to Matt about a potential future house project. (There's a very random cedar closet just outside the inside door in the garage and we might decide to make it a "mudroom" type set up one day.) Anyways... midway through us talking about the closet/mudroom, Annie shut the door. We didn't think anything of it because she is very much into shutting doors whenever she leaves a room. We continued talking for another 30-45 seconds while standing in the garage, but when Matt went to open it, it was locked! And not just the bottom lock that we might have been able to pick with a credit card... she had locked the deadbolt! While she has fiddled with the locks before, I had never actually seen her reach all the way up to the deadbolt before and had definitely never seen her actually turn it.

So there we were in the garage with no keys, and no other routes back into the house. For a few minutes I tried attempting to coax Annie to unlock the door, but I don't think she had any comprehension that she had locked it to begin with, so asking her nicely to "unlock" it obviously meant nothing to her. Thankfully, we could go around to our front door and look through the glass windows in either side of the door to see her and so she could see us. For the most part she just sat on the bottom step of our stairs and cried. Poor girl... she was so frustrated and so hungry! While Matt checked all the doors and windows to see if he could get in another way, I talked to Annie through the window and just tried to keep her occupied. She just kept telling me she wanted to eat! About fifteen minutes in, I think it dawned on her that she was alone in the house with full access to the kitchen. So I watch her as she walks into the kitchen, grabs a package of rolls off the counter and climbs up into her high chair with them. (Such good manners! :)) Unfortunately for Annie, the pesky twisty tie was giving her some problems and she couldn't seem to rip into the bag. So no rolls for Annie after all. Once she was up in the high chair, I went around to the side window in the kitchen so I could talk to her again. I was hoping to encourage her to stay in her high chair... while she's quite proficient in getting up, getting back down can sometimes be a little rough.

Meanwhile Matt had called a locksmith to come out and I was asking Annie various questions to keep her occupied. Ten or fifteen minutes go by and by this time the locksmith has arrived and tried unsuccessfully to get into our front door and garage door. He had just gotten to the back door with Matt when I noticed that Annie was very still. She had fallen asleep in her high chair with the rolls in her lap! Poor girl... Hungry and tired! She woke up when the locksmith started drilling and when Matt walked in the kitchen, she said "Uh oh!" We fed her lunch and then put her down for a nap and she slept 3 1/2 hours! I think she was pooped from her home alone experience!

Needless to say we have decided it might be beneficial to give someone in our neighborhood some extra keys to the house! We are just thankful she didn't bolt for the stairs or go somewhere in the house where we couldn't see her. I think we probably would have broken a window to get inside had we not been able to see what she was up to. So hopefully this can be a lesson for everyone else with small kids without you having to learn it the hard way!

Unfortunately, no pictures from that day, but here is a recent one. Annie loves to turn over the wicker ottoman and sit inside it. Silly girl! (You'll notice she's holding her trusty sidekick "white bear"... she doesn't go far without him!)