The Great Escape

First, a little background information . . .
Even though my children have always been good sleepers, we had a problem with Landen staying in his room for timeouts or bedtime when he was about 2. We finally turned the doorknob around, so we could lock it from the outside. (Don't judge me--it was grandma's idea.) Anyway, it worked great, the boys have since moved out, Teresa has moved in, and we've never bothered to turn the lock back around to the inside. Our doors get locked all the time around the house and the boys know we need a straight "key" to pop the lock when that happens.
That brings me up to this morning. I had just finished dressing Teresa and Nathan was down to his Pull-Up ready to get his underwear and clothes on. Well, his little 3 year old brain thought it would be hilarious to lock the door and come into Teresa's room. I immediately knew we were locked in. He just said, "Get the key." It turned out there was a key on Teresa's dresser, but it was one for the downstairs doorknobs and wasn't long enough to pop the lock. I tried a safety pin with no luck either. The kids, if anything, thought it was great to be locked in a room with mom, so it was nice that they weren't scared at all. Neither was I, but I wasn't so sure that was how I wanted to spend a good part of my day either.
It was about 7:45am. There was an outside chance that David's dad would stop by on his way home from coffee, but that would take at least a half hour if he did stop at all. David was going to be outside for much longer than that--maybe even until close to lunch time.
What to do? What to do? Ahh . . . the window! Of course, it wasn't as simple as just opening the window. The latch is broken on that window, but we usually use a butter knife to get it to come up whenever we open it. Not surprisingly, we don't store butter knives in Teresa's room either! I went through her dresser basket. The baby nail scissors might work--nope too wide on the end. How about the baby nail file? Nope not quite. How about I go back and forth with each of them and keep trying? Finally I got the latch to move up so I could open the window.
Even though the room is just a few steps above ground level, it is still a good size jump to the ground. I put Teresa in her crib and told Nathan to close the window once I was out. There was no way he could climb out, so I wasn't worried about him following me. I just didn't want his near-naked body standing by the open window with the cold breeze blowing in.
I stepped into my slippers--thank heavens I was at least wearing something on my feet--and slid out. I hit the ground, rolled a bit, reminded Nathan to quickly close the window, ran around the house to free my children from our jail.
The entire escape didn't take very long--maybe 15 minutes. If my escape plan hadn't worked, we would have been waiting until 10am until David came in for a cup of hot chocolate.
This just goes to show that being a mom is never a boring occupation!