Muddy Waters With A Little Kung Fu

As I blogged yesterday, it’s been raining here a lot. So naturally we have lots of standing water around and had 2 pretty deep puddles in our back yard. James begged me on the way to school yesterday morning to let him play in the ditches we were passing that were full with water and even though I am a pretty laid back mama, I had to tell him no on that one.

I did however let him go nuts in our own back yard after we got home from Audrey’s ballet class late yesterday afternoon. The event started out a little iffy because I let him go right out when we got home since he was already prepared with rain boots and jacket and I went inside to get the girls dressed appropriately. We were inside a little longer than I expected and I had checked on him a couple times before I went to the front of the house to my office to grab my camera. But as soon as I pulled it out of the bag I heard these horrible, horrible (and I am not exaggerating) sounds coming from outside and it sounded like James. And I knew it was James. I panicked and ran out the front door to find my little boy sobbing on the front porch like there was no tomorrow. “What’s wrong?” I said and he says “I tried to get in the back door and I couldn’t and thought you had locked me out.”


I’ll give you a quick back story. Well, it might not be so quick but it will give you a good laugh! One day a few weeks ago after coming home from picking up the kids at school, I couldn’t get in our back door. I unlocked it but it wouldn’t open. I tried and tried everything I knew to do but couldn’t get it to budge. The alarm on the house was set as usual and we have chains on the other two doors so I knew that if I went and opened those doors I would trip the alarm and if I couldn’t get the chain off (like my cat burglar husband) then the police would come in all their glory and we have a enough other stories that involve the police and fire trucks. Maybe one day you will get lucky enough to hear those stories. I digress. Let me add that my cell phone was dead and I have no car charger so I couldn’t call Jon to find out when he was coming home and let him know what was going on. So I headed back to the school and I figured I had a good chance of passing him on the highway between here and there and already had this brilliant plan of how I was gonna flag him down.

Well, I neither passed him nor found him at the school. Even though I’m sure I completely freaked some dude out in a white pick up truck similar to what my husband drives (did you just get a mental of that?). I decided since those efforts were in vain I would do some good with the extra time I had been given in the day and go visit a friends elderly grandmother who is 101 years old and even though she’s been going down hill the last few months is still ticking away!! We had a nice visit and headed back home after an hour or so only to still find no Jon at home. I started to get nervously frustrated because in the back of my mind I knew Jon had said he had a pretty long meeting that day but I couldn’t remember if he’d said it was from 4-6 or 6-8. And it was getting late and I didn’t want to be sitting around till 8:00 with a bunch of crazy kids. So when I tried to open the door again and still got nothing, I gave it a good kick. And another good kick. After about 4 of those good kicks, I was in. Yes, you read that right. I kicked our door in. I’ve been working out. Obviously. And, my husband came home 10 minutes later.

SO, fast forward to the sobbing boy on the front porch who thought his mother had locked him out of the house. Since said mother had kicked said little boy’s back door in, you can no longer just shut it and have it stay closed. You have to lock it for it to stay closed. And I was not anticipating him trying to get in and thinking I had locked him out. So, there. I am not a bad mother. At least not a really bad mother. Hey, I let my kids play in the MUD!!