Locked In

I just read a post on CupcakeMummas blog about getting locked out of her house whilst her little boy was inside http://cupcakemumma2011.blogspot.ie/2013/10/when-faced-with-locked-door.html .

This made me think of a similar incident that happened to me last December. Stupidly I had left the key to the bathroom door in the lock, on the outside of the door. Jack had been playing upstairs the day before and I wanted to keep him out of the bathroom so I had locked the bathroom from the outside and I forgot to take the key out later on.

So the following morning I am in the bathroom with my daughter who was 14 months old at the time. The bathroom door was ajar and Jack who was 3 at the time was pottering around upstairs. He closed the door then I heard the key turn, I could honestly feel the blood drain from my face. I tried the door and yes it was locked, Jack was laughing at the otherside of the door until he realised he couldn’t turn it back again and that Mammy and Lucy were stuck in the bathroom then he got really really upset. I was trying to calm him down, and I could hear him trying to turn the key but typically the lock was a bit stiff to unlock and the poor little fella had no chance of opening it.  I then heard him go downstairs and then I began to panic, not due to being locked in the bathroom but because Jack was pottering around the house on his own.  I was extremely thankful that I had Lucy with me as she had been walking from 10 months that would have been disastrous, although the only other place she would have been without me would have been in her cot, hence why she was in the bathroom with me at the time!

I tried kicking the door in, but no joy, I tried shouting out my bathroom window hoping one of my neighbours would hear me.  I am at this for ages, screaming my head off and nothing! Thank god there wasn’t a fire or something. Eventually one of my neighbours heard me and I managed to get her to call the OH’s parents who have a spare key, but just as she had called them, I see a towel rail still in the packet hidden in the corner, the OH had been meaning to put it up for the past year. So I got that and managed to put a hole in the door, I called Jack and he came back up to the door, I used a screw from the rail to poke the key out of the lock which fell on the floor and Jack handed me the key through the hole and then I got myself out.  Panic over thank god!

The key for the door has now been put away to stop that from ever happening again.  Thank god the OH didn’t put the towel rail up.  It seems like a funny story when telling people, but at the time I was frantic, I certainly learnt my lesson that day.
  

This is my bathroom door with the hole in it !