Repost: The tale of the mommy, the locked door and the kitchen window

I've contributed to the Orlando Sentinel's Moms at Work blog since 2010. The blog is changing content management systems and my old posts will no longer be available to the public, so I'm reposting them here, in the order that they were originally posted.


Nov. 16, 2011

Once upon a time (two days ago), in a land far, far away (my neighborhood), there lived a mommy, a daddy and a 2-year-old girl.

As the sun was setting on this particular day, the mommy remembered that she hadn't watered the plants she was growing in pots on the deck of the family's home, so she filled a pitcher with water, opened the back door and walked outside. She expected the 2-year-old girl to follow. Instead, the girl closed the door and, to the mommy's surprise, locked it. The mommy was barefoot. The daddy wasn't due home from work for another hour and the mommy's phone was inside the house. The mommy stood at the French door and tried, for nearly 15 minutes, to convince the girl to unlock the door.

At one point, as the sky grew darker and the mommy grew more panicked, the little girl walked away from the back door. About a minute later, the girl returned to the door with a family-size bag of tortilla chips the mommy had foolishly left within the girl's reach on the kitchen counter. The girl stood at the back door, munching away and watching with a quizzical expression on her face as the mommy tried to instruct her on how to unlock the door.

The mommy thought about trying to go to neighbor's house, but the little girl grew agitated when the mommy walked away from the door.

Something had to be done. The mommy walked over to the kitchen window and pulled at the screen, ripping half of it away. She then discovered that the kitchen window was not locked and made a mental note to thank the daddy for resisting her maniacal nagging about locking all the windows and doors at all times (just this once!). The mommy opened the window and climbed through it, scraping her legs and a finger and landing in the kitchen sink.

The girl was unfazed.

The mommy considered selling the girl to the circus. Instead, the mommy sat down and laughed.