Happy accident

Tonight, I did a stupid thing.

The weather was nice, so when I picked Clay up from daycare, I told him we could ride his bike when we got home. We went straight from the garage, through the house, and into the back yard via the kitchen door. As I closed the door behind us, I thought I heard a click.

Now, we have one of those kitchen door knobs that automatically locks if you turn the button one way, but doesn't if you keep the button turned in the other direction. For this reason, we always keep the button in the "unlock" position. However, either someone moved it sometime this week, or I nudged it myself when I was opening and closing the door, because IT AUTOMATICALLY LOCKED US OUT. So there Clay and I sit in the back yard at 5 p.m. There'll be no sign of hubs until at least 6:15 p.m. In the meantime, I've got to occupy a hungry (and soon to be dirty) toddler.

Now, part of me was frustrated with myself for being dumb enough to lock us out. But part of me started to think that this might be a pretty fun adventure. First off, we went next door to see the neighbor's dog. The dog barks like crazy every time he sees us. Clay is always scared at first, but then he starts getting excited and yelling, "Dog! Dog! Woof!"

Then, we decided to go over and talk to our across-the-street neighbors. They were out in their driveway working on some furniture projects. This was fun. They are an older couple, and they think Clay is the cutest thing ever. Plus, they have tons of little statues in their front yard - bunnies, frogs, dogs, all kinds of stuff. Clay loves pointing them out to me, telling me what each animal is, the sound it makes, etc. (We also used their phone to leave hubs a quick voicemail, letting him know we were locked out, just in case he wanted to knock off a little early.)

After that, we decided to walk down to the res, which is really close to our house. We saw a guy on a jet ski. He kept motoring out and back. I almost started to think he was doing tricks for us! (Clay kept saying, "HEY!! Whatcha doin'?" to him. Soooo precious!) We jumped in some puddles. We met a man and his mother who were picking up pecans off the ground under a few of the pecan trees out there. (They were on a 4-wheeler, which Clay found completely fascinating.) We found a bunch of those little white flowers (weeds, but I always thought they were beautiful when I was little). We ran around in them, picked a few. We saw a plane in the sky and watched it until we couldn't see it anymore.

Then, we walked a little bit down the walking trail that runs by the side of the road. As we were trotting along, who should drive up but hubs? He picked us up and took us back to the house, where we had a very satisfying dinner of chicken nuggets and chunks of pear.

Little man was all smiles as we kicked off our shoes and sunk our bare toes into the carpet. He ate nearly all of his supper and hopped into a bubble bath (these are becoming really popular at our house) before watching 30 minutes of Bee Movie, reading some stories, and going happily to bed.

We actually had a really great time. And if I'd been "together" enough to have left the door unlocked, we would have missed it.

The world, I am convinced, is a wonderful place.

Comments

HEATHER said…
Sounds wonderful!