Locked Out

We've been inside our cozy house for less than an hour now, in spite of the fact that we arrived about 11:30 from Maryland.

Today was one of those (fortunately) rare unfortunate occasions in which the stuff nightmares are made of come true. On Wednesday when we left, I made a fatal mistake: I suggested we bring an extra set of keys for the car, one that didn't have the house key in it. K was using that key to drive and had left the other key in the car (between the two seats, on the floor). On Friday, however, when the car was full of my Black Friday shopping stuff, I decided to bring the other key inside the house -- after all, it's not very wise to leave your car keys inside the car, right? RIGHT?

Except that tonight K used the spare key to drive to church, left it in his pocket and reused it again in the evening -- so he never had to pick up the key from the key hooks at brother-in-law's house.

We realized we didn't have our house key until we'd driven half way home. I remembered that we had the garage opener in the glove compartment and didn't stress too much. And then, we often forget one of the back doors unlocked, so I thought that those could be an option.

Well... guess what? Everything that could go wrong went 100% wrong. The garage opener wouldn't work. The other garage opener (inside our other unlocked car, parked in the driveway) didn't work either. ALL doors were locked. There's a balcony off our bedroom and I thought that maybe that door would be unlocked. K climbed on the trash can and hoisted himself up (getting hurt in the process), but NO, the door was locked as well!

We went to the two convenience stores in our small town looking for batteries for the garage door opener, but they didn't have any. We even bought a Phillips screwdriver to try to open the opener, but it was too big and I finally opened it with a paper clip. It was one of those tiny 6V batteries. In the end, we drove all the way to a Wal Mart Supercenter (20 minutes away) so K could buy the batteries. I was napping in the car (while the kids, who woke up when we got home, talked) and when K came back, he asked, what if the neighbor (who was looking after the cats) locked the door from the garage to the house? Oh no! I truly hoped that wasn't true. I slept on the way home and jumped out of the car as soon as we got here. The opener worked and the door was unlocked, PHEW!!!

What a night! K was joking that at least it would be an unforgettable night for all of us and that this would probably never happen again.

Seriously, besides sticking extra house keys in each car, I want to install one of those keypads outside of the garage, it's how we got out of situations like this in our rental house and our last house in Pennsylvania.

Good thing I got to talk to my brother on skype, though! It helped that we were still up. I will write the post about their experience (pretty interesting, as a matter of fact, more cultural differences in maternal and newborn health care) tomorrow. And it might even include a photo of the baby!!

Well, good night (for me)... good morning for my readers!