One Day I'll Look Back at this and Laugh...

...but this is still not that day.

Last week that was my Facebook status after Julia had a meltdown before bed. She was tired and didn't want to go to bed and everything I said to her made it worse.

"Do you want a glass of milk?"

"No! I don't want any MILK!"

"Then what do you want, water or juice?"

" I want MILK!"

*Sigh*

But this is not the day I'm talking about now. I can already look back at that tantrum and laugh about how absurd she was being.

No, now I'm talking about a day that I'm sure we (or Julia and I at least) will look back at and say, "Hey, remember that day when...we were locked in your room for seven hours?" And then we will laugh and laugh.  Yeah, someday.

Last Friday we really did get locked in Julia's room for seven hours. It was right after we finished a late lunch and we went up to the kid's room to change a diaper. We still hadn't finished putting all the groceries away from when we went to the store earlier that day and the dishes from lunch weren't cleaned up because I was planning on coming right back.

On the way up Julia said she wanted me to lock her in her room again. A few nights earlier she kept getting up out of bed after I had put her to bed. Our old renters had changed the knobs on the upstairs doors so the lock was on the outside and we hadn't switched them back yet. So that night I locked the door from the outside to keep her from coming out. It worked, once she realized she couldn't get out anymore she stopped crying and went to bed.

But I felt a little guilty for doing it. So when she told me on Friday she wanted me to lock her in her room I told her that we weren't going to do that anymore. After I had changed Micah's diaper we played in their room for a while and then I decided it was time to go finish cleaning up. I tried to turn the knob, and it was locked! I tried turning it again and rattling the door, as if that would would unlock an obviously locked door, with no results.

Then I asked Julia. "Julia, did you lock the door."

"Yes, because I wanted you to lock me in my room"

"Well sweetie, how are we going to get out of your room?"

"Daddy will unlock it for us."

This was about 3:00 p.m and Robert was obviously at work. "But Julia, Daddy is at work. He can't unlock the door for us because he's not home. Now we are stuck in here."

"Oh."

And then she went back to playing with her toys while I looked around the room for something that I could use to unlock the door. I rummaged around the closet, but there really wasn't much. I came up with a safety pin and a nail that I took out of the wall. I tried for a while to get the door unlocked with those, but they just weren't long enough.

I was really mentally kicking myself for not having my phone with me. I normally carry it around in my pocket when I'm at home, but the phone was still sitting in my purse from when we went to the grocery store. Otherwise I could have called Robert and we could have been out in a couple hours, tops. I figured trying to yell out the window for the neighbors wouldn't work because they had no way of getting into the house to unlock the bedroom door since I always keep all the outside doors locked. Same thing with me trying to get out through the window (the bigger problem with that though is that we were on the second floor).

So, I kind of resigned to wait it out until Robert got home. It's busy season for him, so I knew it was going to be a long wait, but I wasn't exactly sure when he would be home since he always comes home at different times. We did pretty good just playing around except for one fifteen minute stretch when Micah was tired and crying. While I was trying to get him to sleep Julia accidently kneeled on one of her toy cars and got a little cut that started to bleed. I think that's when it hit her that we really couldn't leave because she wanted to go get a Dora band-aid, but I told her we couldn't because we were stuck. Then she started to cry too.

Soon they were both asleep though and we all took like a three hour nap. When we woke up it was almost dark and I was hoping Robert would be home soon. The time passed when he would have been home on the 7:20 pm (meaning leave downtown LA at 7:20 pm) train, so I knew it would be at least another hour. More playing with toys, reading books, and dancing to the music on the radio. Julia started to complain she was hungry and thirsty. When it was time for Robert to be home if he took the 8:20 pm train we started looking out the window a lot, and one of the times we looked we saw a light on in the garage. Yay, he's home!

So we waited and waited for him to come out of the garage. I figured maybe he was writing an email in the car before he came out. More waiting, and then the light went out. Augh, did we just imagine it? I rocked Micah to sleep and put him down in his crib. I tried picking the lock again with the safety pin. A few minutes later Micah woke up again and started crying. That's when I started feeling really claustrophobic decided that maybe Robert had come home and just hadn't come upstairs.

So Julia and I started yelling from the door and then figuring he might be watching TV I yelled down the air vent. After a couple minutes I was standing by the crib giving Micah his binkie and Robert opened the door.  It was 10:30 pm. "Finally," I said, "we've been stuck in here for seven hours."

"Have you really?" Robert said. He had indeed been downstairs watching T.V. for the last hour, thinking that we were all asleep (did he not notice the groceries and the dishes? I never leave things out like that before I go to bed) and had heard a faint voice calling his name. But he was confused because if I was calling him, why didn't I just open the door so he could actually hear me? He did feel bad that he had just been sitting around for an hour while we were stuck upstairs.

So that's it. I still am a little irked that I had to spend most of the afternoon and all evening stuck in a little room. Luckily though, nothing catastrophic happened while we were in there and Julia got some Mom time with nothing (such as a little pink iphone I tend to look at a lot) but Micah to distract me. One day I am sure we will laugh about it.