whoops, I locked my keys in the house: A DC adventure

 Let me begin as most glorious stories begin, at the beginning. According to physicists the Big Bang probably occurred around…too soon. Listen, before I leave the house I always check and make sure that I have my keys in my pocket. Okay, honestly, sometimes I don’t check until after I’ve locked the door. But listen, the keys are always in my pocket.

However, I always have my keys. Except, this time I didn’t have my keys. Luckily I had just put a sweatshirt and socks on baby Ian before leaving the house. I thought about not putting on the sweatshirt and the sock s but then I thought of how all the moms who pick up their kids would have judged me, and I put socks and a sweatshirt on him.

“We’re going to have to break into the house buddy?” He didn’t seem to understand. We’re not quite Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Naturally I tried the door again because maybe I just pretend locked the door. Sadly, I had not pretend locked the door. I had actually locked the door. Ian stood in his socks on the front porch, presumably enjoying the breeze. Luckily the temperature was in the upper 40’s, twenty degrees above what it had been of late.

It’s time to break into the house. I’ve been compared to Bat Man and Spider Man in my past, mainly by myself at Halloween, but still, I was pretty sure I could break in. While Ian stood by occasionally mumbling “huh” I expertly tugged off the window screens (Ouch, I hurt my finger. Why is this so hard?) and then deftly opened the window and slid into the house. Except wait, the window is locked.

“Let’s go around to the side yard buddy.” He doesn’t have much choice in the matter because he can’t talk or take more than two steps without falling. Babies.  Shakes head.

I expertly popped the screen out and opened the window. (What was I going to do if the window was open? I don’t know if I would have fit through it. Maybe I’d have explained the plan to Ian and then lowered him through the window. I’m married to the sort of person who locks all the basement windows. If it was up to me, all the windows would be unlocked and we’d share a communal toilet with our neighbors, not because I’m a hippie mind you, it’s just that sometimes it’s annoying to lock the windows.

I called a friend like on who wants to be a millionaire except my question was, who wants to get back inside their house in time to get their keys and go pick up their daughter at preschool. It’s pretty much the same concept. She was at work. “No problem,” I tell her, looking at Ian, standing in his socks on a bunch of gravel with a large bit of snot just starting to form below his nose. “I got this.”

Like any normal adult I called my mom.

Mom: I live in CA.

Me: So you are fixing this or you aren’t? You’re being unclear.

Mom: You did what?

Me: I fed my keys to a whale. Not all my choices are good ones.

Mom: I’ll call the preschool and tell them you’ll be late.

Me: So you’re paying for a cab from where?

I took to the streets with Ian in my right arm tucked snugly away. I wonder what he thought of all this? Babies man. Except I took one last look at our house. What if I jumped up on the railing, swung from the bottom gutter, did a muscle up, pulled myself onto the small roof and pried open a window. This would all be so much easier if I shot webs from my hand. Back to the street.

I’m walking down the street with my little baby son trying to ignore everyone who is staring at us. Just going for a brisk walk folks. Strollers are overrated. I have no idea where I’m going. I see a bus. We jaywalk. Well, kind of run. I run across the street with my son held snugly to catch a random bus. We catch it. 

“Where does this bus go?” I ask the driver.

Driver: Straight Down.

Me: So it hits Florida

Driver: Straight down.

Me: So I get off at Florida?

Driver: Straight down. 

Me: How bout this weather? Who would have thought we'd make it to Mid-April. 

Driver: Straight down. 

Driver: noticing that I can’t balance Ian and put the second dollar in the machine. You’re fine, move on.

I sit proudly on the bus with Ian in my lap. That’s when I notice that he has dried snot all over his face that’s making him look like he has some sort of skin disease coupled with bad parenting. The lady next to us wakes up from her mid-morning drug induced nap and says, “wipe that baby’s nose.” She pulls through her purse, discarding some used tissue before settling on something in the bottom of her bag. I start to use it to wipe his nose then think better of it and just hold the partially used random tissue in my hand on the bus along with my filthy little son, looking boss. And by boss I mean white trash as I had my had on backwards and that grimy buddy.

Eventually, an elderly gentleman in the seat behind me patted me on the shoulder and said, “Do you need one of these? It looks like his nose could use a wipe?” I’d spent the last ten minutes on the bus trying to brush his face effectively with the sleeves of my sweatshirt, but I was happy to get a Kleenex that was, you know, a Kleenex and proceeded to try and wipe his nose while he rolled his head from side to side like I was burning him with fire. This child does not like having his face wiped. Luckily this nice old gentleman noted that he wasn’t having any of it, and I felt a brief moment of human connection.

M: I locked my keys in my car that’s how I ended up here.

Man: Oh. That’s too bad.

Me: Realizing that our stop is coming up and that I need to pull the cord and also that I’ve told him I locked them in the car when I meant house. “Also, a dragon destroyed our house.”

Man: Are you going to get help?

Me: Dragons man. Can you believe it? What are the chances? Have a nice day. Don’t wake that nice lady who is napping there. I think she’s taking this bus all the way round.

We stepped off the bus with a little giddyup in our step. Nothing starts the morning off right like two wadded up pieces of tissue with a collection of snot and Lord only knows what on them. I found a trash can and deposited one. Then we walked down beautiful Florida avenue.

Random Lady: Hey.

Me: Yes

Random Lady: Put a hood on that boy.

Me: Okay. (Looks down at sweatshirt and notices it doesn’t have a hood). Walks faster with a feeling, not of parental guilt but of murderous rage. I’m fairly certain now that if one more person criticizes me for trying to make this work that I’m going to have to punch them and since I already look like white trash, and I’ll be holding my baby in my right arm while I punch wildly with my left, it’s just going to confirm the opinion. Luckily I’m allowed to continue the last few blocks without any random person telling me that I should never have had children. Ian is nonplussed.

An arrival:

We finally get to pre-school forty minutes late on a sun-splashed day, our pride still intact. I walk Ian in and immediately wipe his nose in the bathroom. He cries as I remove several layers of crust that make him look like a lizard man. Then we pick up Sadie.

Sadie: I want to go to the playground.

Me: Well. I don’t have the car. We’re taking the bus.

Sadie: Yay. The bus.

Me: Kids are so easy to fool.

Sadie: What?

Me: The wheels on the bus go round and round.

It’s every parents dream to be meandering through the streets of DC with a 15 month old and a 3 year old in tow and luckily I got to live it. We walked a few blocks before I finally heard from S.

S: What happened?

Me: I locked the keys in the house. Also, there was a thing with a dragon that I can’t get into right now.

S: Where are you now?

Me: Somewhere just over Tahiti.. I panicked and chartered a plane.

S: Do you have the kids?

Me: Yeah. We’re thinking of taking a hot air balloon home, but I realized I don’t have the keys.

S: What if I come meet you with my keys in a taxi.

Me: I was planning on just staying at a restaurant for a while, buying a muffin every now and again and then using their bathroom. Essentially, it really sucks to be homeless. It took me roughly 1.5 hours of not getting into my house to consider peeing on doorsteps and taking my children into a cardboard shelter.

S: Where are you.

Me: Sadie! Sadie get back here. And why are your shoes off?

Sadie: Ian took his socks off.

Me: Looks down at two barefooted children on a little strip of pavement between three streets. “Things are going well. I’m not sure you need to come.”

S: I’ll call you from the taxi.

From there, we walked another few blocks looking for an agreeable place to spend time and avoid people who would tell me to put shoes on my child.

Me: Look, Sadie. Ian’s waving at that hand. (I’ve got my parenting happiness turned up to a wattage of nine because you don’t want the kids to sense that you’re on the verge of losing your shi- and moving to a foreign country where you’ll herd goats for the next thirty years until your blood pressure goes down).

Ian: Waves at giant ceramic hand in park.

We walked towards the giant hand because it looked inviting. Then we kept walking because giant ceramic hands are strange, and I swear when I turned around it was flipping me off. We arrived at a bus stop on 11^th, I called S, and let the kids crawl around on a lawn in front of a school. Granted, the lawn was  raised up off the street, so I had to lift both kids off and then periodically run after them like a hen squawking at her young if they got close to the edge. I mean, I know that they know the edge is there, but I don’t know if they understand that it’s a problem for them.

Sadie: (Runs toward edge).

Me: (Holds a sockless and laughing baby Ian in his arm while running after her) Sadie! Stop!

Sadie: Why?

Me: Because there is an edge. Have you seen Cliffhanger and Vertical Limit? People who fall off edges end up dying, and the people who survive them have to dramatic things in order to get over the fact that they let their friend fall.

Sadie: Oh

Me: Plus it’s a lot of paperwork. (This is something she really understands as I always explain to her that the reason I don’t speed and smash into other cars when she wants us to go faster is that it would end up with a lot of paperwork).

In the distance, a group of teenage boys, who definitely should be in school, circle on their bikes outside of an apartment complex hopefully dealing drugs.

Me: We’re in a little slice of heaven, kids.

Eventually the taxi arrives, and we get the house keys and go on a bus ride home. But I can tell that by the end of this journey the kids are a little bit sad to see the fun come to an end. I on the other hand am about as tired as I can be, and I tell Sadie to play while Ian and I take a nap. He cries for the better part of half an hour, but I sleep anyway, except when Sadie occasionally stops by to show me something she’s built with the Legos and it comes crashing down on my head because it’s too top heavy.

After an hour or so of sleep I wander downstairs to see what has happened. And there in the middle of the floor are 12 bottles of wine, lined up in a row.

Me: What?

Sadie: I was having a party.

Me: I can’t wait until you’re a teenager.