Yesterday's Scare

Yesterday I was locked out of the house for over 20 minutes while my two screaming children were inside.

Mollie got her pictures taken two weeks ago by my friend Shauna, who came by yesterday to drop off the much anticipated CD of images. When I answered the door crazy Dixie ran out and jumped on Shauna, so I quickly corralled her back inside and closed the door. The second the door closed, I heard a little "click," and lo and behold, Sam had locked me out.

After laughing about it for about a minute and a half, then unsuccessfully trying to explain to Sam how to unlock the door, panic started to set in. I called Devin from Shauna's phone, but he was 45 minutes away. I called our realtor to see if there was anyone in the area who could come unlock our door via the lockbox (they no longer have lock box codes...you have to have a special key to unlock it), but she couldn't think of anyone. She offered to come and unlock it herself, but she was at least a half hour away.

I was mostly worried about Mollie, because of Sam's roughness with her lately. I made sure I kept Sam by the door, who was screaming his head off, not understanding why I wasn't coming back inside. In the meantime Devin had called a locksmith and his brother Adam to see if they could come to our rescue, but I couldn't stand the thought of just sitting there and waiting. After saying a short prayer, Shauna and I started looking around for something to break a window.

Right before we were about to seriously decide which window to break, I decided to see if I could pry off the doorknob by bending the lockbox. Holy cow it actually worked. It was a good thing Shauna was there with me, though, because I was just looking at the broken-off doorknob and wondering what good that did me, when she pointed out that now the inside doorknob had nothing keeping it in tact, so she used the broken part of the doorknob to push out the other part of the doorknob (confused?).

The instant I opened the door poor Sam lunged at my legs and wouldn't let go. Mollie was in her bouncing chair in our bedroom and gave me a dirty look as I went to pick her up. Adam arrived just after we had gotten the door open, and after saying goodbye to he and Shauna, I knelt with my babies and said a prayer of thanks.

Just the night before Devin and I had watched a video by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland in which he said of the job of being a mother, "heaven itself sends angels to watch over you and your little ones." I heard that quote in my head as soon as this scary event was over, and I knew that it was true.


What's left of our front doorknob