No 1 son got himself locked inside his room. Photo / 123rf
It has been a bad week for Mrs P, with several unfortunate incidents occurring while we’ve been on grandparent duties down the line.
For starters, there was an incident involving a coat rack.
It was comfortably attached to a wall, and looked like it had been for some time when Mrs P entered its life.
There were perhaps four jackets already on the rack - one of those long ones with four individual hooks - when she added a fifth to the mix.
Now we don’t know exactly what occurred – as My Beloved suggested it’s entirely possible a heavy spider may have climbed all over the garments which put extra pressure on the hooks (ahem) - but somewhere in the wee small hours of the other morning, the entire thing fell to the ground, pulling its anchors out through the wall lining and leaving, well, a rather unsightly mess.
So that was incident number one with the finger of blame pointed at you know who.
Incident number two involved playtime with the little tacker.
To be fair, this could have happened to anyone, but fate decreed Mrs P was in the hot seat again that day.
She had been crawling around on the floor with the wee fellow when, somehow, he escaped her grasp for perhaps a millisecond and put a chubby little finger on a bottle positioned halfway up a nearby wine rack.
Consequently, the bottle was pushed out of its slot and into another one below which shattered sending red wine and glass shards everywhere.
Naturally, the safety of the wee cherub had top priority so he was immediately evacuated from the vicinity while Yours Truly spent the next hour or so wiping, scrubbing, wiping again, vacuuming and going over the area with a torch just in case any glass shards remained.
And so to the third incident.
On this particular evening, the Bride To Be and I have gone off grocery shopping, leaving Mrs P at home looking after the Little Tacker and No 1 Son behind the closed door of his bedroom on a Zoom meeting.
Again, the details of exactly what happened are a little sketchy, but somewhere along the line, the baby has gone off to sleep and the Zoom meeting has finished.
Missus P is lying on her bed reading a book when she hears a noise, she says, like someone tapping on the lounge window.
Becoming increasingly anxious as the noise continues, she taps on the door of No 1 Son’s bedroom for assistance. No answer.
Thinking he’s still on his Zoom call, probably with headphones on, he can’t hear her knocks.
So she tries the door handle. It’s locked. Just as it was when she went to check on “her” own baby an hour before.
This is crucial given future events.
A little worried by this stage she gives up on the door and quickly races round the house making sure all the exterior windows and doors are secure.
Then she hunkers down outside the baby’s bedroom door and waits for the cavalry – myself and the Bride To Be – to return. Which we do, a short while later, to a rather odd sight.
On the lower roof of the house, in the dark, some three metres above where we’ve just parked, sits No 1 Son.
Long story short. It seems he’d finished his meeting but found his bedroom door locked, and himself trapped inside, when he tried to leave.
Not wanting to wake the baby up with loud knocking for help, he’d climbed out his bedroom window, shuffled across the roof ridge below to the lounge window and had been tapping for a good 10 minutes without success hoping to attract the attention of Mrs P inside.
Eventually (it’s quite hard to open windows when you are laughing so much) I let him in and we all stand around in the lounge piecing together the odd sequence of events.
But there’s still a problem.
The bedroom door, somehow, is still locked.
No 1 Son is cold, a bit peeved and all for kicking it in but thankfully the Bride To Be is keen to tackle the problem lock with tools instead and before you can say She’s A Keeper, she’d hopped out the lounge window with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, shimmied across the roof ridge, climbed in through the bedroom window and started attacking the lock from inside the bedroom.
By this stage, the adrenaline coursing through the frame of No 1 Son has subsided enough for him to accept a less physical solution might be more appropriate.
Eventually, they manage to remove the entire mechanism and the door gently opens.
Breakfast discussions next day centre on what could have happened, Mrs P’s supposedly innocent twisting of the handle the only possibility we can think of between fits of laughter as she proclaims her innocence. Again.
Naturally, we accept any of these incidents could have happened to any of us but it’s too good an opportunity to pass up, so we give Mrs P a new nickname.
She’s now known as The Common Denominator or, more affectionately, The CD.
I figure I’ll tease her for a few more days and then she’ll be back to being Mrs P, who we all love regardless, once again.
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