I posted the story in an open online community back then, which is why I changed the names of my kids. Anyhow:
My wife and I have 2 sons, a teenager and a toddler. Bob, our teenager, is perfectly capable of getting himself up and out in the morning, and does so. Sam, the toddler who will be 3 in less than a month, usually serves as our alarm clock. He usually wakes up between 8 and 9 and wakes us up. He has his own room, and after we put him down for the night, we would put 2 gates across his doorway to keep him in there both before he goes to sleep (which he doesn’t want to do some nights) and in the morning. When he wakes up he comes to the gates and starts yelling for us to let him out, which is our cue to get up and start the day. At least, that’s the way things worked until a couple of days ago. A couple of days ago he discovered that he is strong enough to defeat the gates by pushing them out of the doorway.
So, off to Home Depot I go, and I buy a hook and eye latch for the outside of his door. Last night I latched his door(I know I did I checked twice) and put up the gates out of force of habit. This morning I awoke to hear a thumping, and faint cries from Sam, which I assume is him banging on his door wanting out. I go out into the hall and see…
His door is open, his light is on AND the gate is pushed out into the hallway. WTF? I look into his room. No Sam, but his diaper is sitting on the floor(he only wears it at night and we have a HELL of a time getting him to keep it on. We tape it with packing tape each night, last night we were out and the babysitter did it; obviously she didn’t get the tape tight enough.)
“SAM?” I yell.
Listening, the thumps I hear seem to be coming from downstairs. I run down. “SAM?” I notice that the front door is open and run outside (in just my tighty whities, if I’d slept nude I’d have gone out starkers). No Sam. I look in the front yard, scan the street, no Sam, and besides I had heard the banging sounds from inside. I run back in, he’s not in the living or dining rooms, I rush downstairs, “SAM! SAM!” I’m screaming. He’s not down in my office or the laundry room. I pound back upstairs and stop to listen I hear the banging again, my wife is running down from our bedroom, and I notice that the sound is coming from the back door and I can see through the window that the screen door is open. I grab the door. Locked! I unlock it, and there, between the back door and the screen door, huddled naked and looking cold is Sam, along with the dog. He says “I’m ready to come in now, Daddy”.
I scooped him up and he was chilly, but nothing too bad, thank God we’ve had a mild October. My wife bundles him out of my arms and under her robe to warm him up. He cries a little, but all in all he’s not too excited about his ordeal. That makes one of us anyway. Pretty soon he announces that he’s hungry, and our day slips back into it’s normal track as we feed him breakfast.
It was easy to figure out what happened, of course. Bob, with a teenager’s indifference, must have left the front door open when he left for school, he’s done it before. Sam woke up, yanked on his door, and Shazam! the hook popped out of the eye (did you know that could happen? I didn’t, but I tried it myself, and sure enough, it did. I had the kind with the spring clasp over the bottom half of the hook too. Worthless), giving him access to the gates. He pushed the bottom one down, crawled out, went downstairs, and hey, look! An open door! Out he goes. He drew on the porch with chalk for a few minutes, then he took the watering can out into the side yard (where I found it later), went around the fenced in back yard to the alley, where he came back into our back yard, and then to the back door and started banging. You know the rest.
Sam’s door now has a brand new doorknob with a lock on it, the lock facing the outside, of course.
That was fun.
