She really did it this time

I sat big girl and baby boy down at the table with some food and stepped out to the back yard to feed the dogs. Big girl gets the bright idea to hop up and stroll over to the back door and lock the glass storm door. Which means that she and her baby brother are locked inside and I am outside with a couple of dogs and no keys.

I spend fifteen minutes attempting to coach her on how to turn the knob and unlock the door - but apparently she only knows how to turn it in one direction: the one that locks me out. She just looks at me and giggles and twirls her hair around her finger while I try to get her to unlock the door, but it's no use.

It's kind of dark in the back yard, and I'm kind of stuck in there, too. There are two gates. One is six feet tall and locked from the other side. The other is a gate in a chain link fence, and it's only about four feet tall. But it's on the dark side of the house, and because it has too much give there at the gate, such that determined dogs can wiggle through and escape if they feel so inclined, it also has three pieces of rope tying it shut. Three separate pieces of rope, with fancy knots, and it's completely dark on that side of the house. No exterior lights, no lights coming from the windows of my house or my neighbor's, since they aren't home. So - since only the dogs could see me, and they can't speak English - I climbed oh-so-gracefully over the chain length fence and plopped down on the other side. Fortunately I did not tear my jeans on the fence or land on my ass.

I went to the front door to see if I could coax big girl into unlocking it, but my efforts there were similarly unsuccessful. So I hiked up the street, in the dark except for some nice moonlight (because the exterior light in our front yard is broken at present), to see our friends up the street. They didn't have a spare key - I thought they might but no - but they did send their teenage girls down to keep an eye on big girl and baby boy through the front windows while I called Hubs on his cell phone.

Hubs was working late on a project, but he excused himself and raced home while I stood on the front porch with neighbor friend and continued to (unsuccessfully) coax big girl on the unlocking of dead bolts. By the time Hubs got there, baby boy was crying (but safely ensconced in his high chair where I had left him), and big girl had darted away from the front door several times to play in the water and make a big mess in the bathroom. She also grinned and made faces through the glass at us, brought out a drippy washcloth and wiped the window with it while proclaiming, "I wash your window," and danced around with her toy iron. She did not console her crying brother, despite my requests that she do so, and yet she also managed not to injure herself, her brother, or the house, aside from the water in the bathroom floor. So I was pretty relieved. And from now on, she will accompany me into the back yard to feed the dogs when Hubs isn't home, and I will also take the keys with me.

This wasn't the first time she had locked that storm door - she did it twice before, fortunately when Hubs was home to unlock it and let me back in. I guess that means I'm a slow learner and I should have seen this coming. My mom laughed when I told her about this, since she still remembers the time when I locked her out of the house and she had to break a window to get back inside. Yeah, I was about the same age that the big girl is now.