Lockout

Yesterday there was a serious situation at my house: I got locked outside. This was no accident, someone DELIBERATELY locked me out of the house.

Earmuffs!

I’d taken the daycare kids out to play in the backyard at the end of the day, and only had my phone with me, not my keys. A couple of neighbor-girls were out too so I called Sym to come outside and play, since she’d been holed up in her room almost the entire day. Sym didn’t want to come out, but I said she had to and she got really irritated with me. After whining and complaining on the phone she came out and sat next to me, whining and complaining some more. It was really frustrating, so I told her that if she was going to behave like a brat she could go back inside and go to bed. Which she did, and promptly fell asleep (note to self: look into re-lowering her bedtime), but not before LOCKING THE DAMN DOOR.

I didn’t realize what she’d done until after the kids were all picked up (luckily I had all their stuff outside with me), but if there had been some sort of accident or emergency it could have been really bad. I tried banging on the door and calling both Sym and Taylor but they were both asleep so eventually I had to go around the far side of the house and climb through a bunch of scaffolding (my house is being painted this week) and bang on the window to wake Taylor up. By this point I was RULL MAD so Sym go a very very serious talking to, by which I mean yelling at. She’s now grounded for a week, which means no:
• tv
• computer
• videogames
• iphone
• non-emergency phone calls
… so she’s going to have plenty of time to think about what she did.

3 Replies to “Lockout”

    1. The fatal flaw of my grounding plan is that without technology to entertain her, she won’t stop asking me to describe the plots of every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

      1. My biggest conundrum when taking away privileges has been whether or not to take away reading. Because it’s entertainment and something she enjoys, but I don’t ever want to ban anyone from reading. Usually taking away the computer and text messaging works wonders, though.

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