It was a lovely, warm, sun-filled Saturday. A friend and her two girls were coming over for a play date, while our husbands spent the day with little white balls and metal sticks on a luscious, green carpet of grass.
At 8am, I realized that we were running low on milk. Blasphemy! No milk = crabby kids. I quickly gathered up the kids and headed outside with the intention of walking to the grocery store. For some reason, I made a last minute decision to drive (could have something to do with my complete and utter terminal exhaustion lately.) I strapped Elsa into her car seat, shut her door, then grabbed James to get him situated. Just as I was reaching for the door on James’s side of the car, I hear an unmistakable, “BEEP”. Elsa had my keys. She was in the car. DAMMIT!! Oh, and so was my purse, and my phone.
The fire truck, pulling away.
The next 2 minutes were spent begging and pleading with Elsa to hit the button just below her favorite “BEEP” button. “Please Elsa, hit the button sweetie! Pleeeaaaasssee.” She stared at me blankly. At one point, she turned the key over, and proceeded to put her tiny little finger on the alarm button. “Oh, NO, NO, Elsa… not that one!” Crisis averted. Whew. But, we still had the other, oh so obvious crisis. Tail between my legs, I rang our neighbor’s doorbell. Sheepishly, I asked, “Hey, do you happen to have the non-emergency number for the police?”
A few minutes later, a 20 foot fire truck rounds the bend at the end of the block. Sheer embarrassment. Three nice guys exit the vehicle. It’s quite obvious this wasn’t their first kid-in-the-car rodeo. With three strangers suddenly surrounding her, Elsa started crying. I tried to comfort her, telling her that one day she’d have a good laugh about all of this. Nice firefighter man says, “Oh, she’ll be ok, we’ll have her out in a couple of minutes. She won’t remember a thing.” I replied, “no, but I will!”
Five minutes later, Elsa was free. Window smash averted!
As the door swings open, the car alarm goes off. Perfect! On the positive side, my alarm system works. Unfortunately, Elsa had “misplaced” the keys during the excitement. Two big burly guys and I were frantically searching for the dang keyring (well, in all honesty, I was frantically searching, they were cool as cucumbers!) BEEP, BEEP, BEEP. “Elsa, you just had them!” Oh, yeah, let’s bring even more attention to my stupidity. “Hey neighbors, look what I did!” BEEP, BEEP. The side pocket of the door. Of course.
After a massive amount of thank you’s were mumbled, the fire truck quietly pulled away.
