A Brief Moment of Thanks on Sunday Morning

We got a free pass from God this morning. Since the baby fussed through church last week, this week I left him at home with Aaron and took the two big boys with me. Unbeknown to me, Aaron was taking out the trash when we left. I shut the garage door and we left. Because of my hyper-vigilance about locking doors, this means that Aaron was locked out. Not good on a normal day. Especially not good given that on this particular day, the baby was locked in. Even more not good because by the time he realized he was locked out, I was gone. Even MORE not good because my cell phone was in my diaper bag, which was in the house. And not with me.

He started walking to church (it's a 10 minute walk) before he realized that I would probably kill him if he showed up there having left the house (with the baby in it) unguarded. So he knocked on the door of every neighbor, only to find that they were all gone. Finally he found one home across the street who was willing to A) stand guard in the rain on our front porch and B) let him borrow her car so he could drive to church and fetch me and the keys to unlock the door.

It was probably only ten minutes between when he found me and when we retrieved the baby, but I swear it took ten years off of my life. It took me a minute to register the sight of Aaron (in his trash-taking-out clothes and sandals) standing before me in church. Sans baby. Naturally, I flew into a panic. We dashed home, leaving the big boys in the church nursery. Of course, we drove up to the train tracks at the entrance of our neighborhood just as the gates were lowering. Aaron wanted to drive through them, but I truly felt like the only thing that could make the situation worse was if we were dead on the train tracks (having decimated our neighbor's car) with half of our children locked in the house and the other half in the church nursery. Nope. Not a good plan. So he u-turned like a bat out of hell to beat the train at the next entrance to the neighborhood and we flew up the street to our house.

Once home, it was all painless. We unlocked the door and quickly retrieved the baby, who had worked himself into a tizzy enough to have snot all over his face and a little spit up. Our neighbor, bless her heart, tried to calm my hysteria by assuring me that she had been listening to him cry through the window and he was fine. She assured me that had she needed to get to him quickly, she would have broken the window. But my heart is still pounding four hours later.

So thank you, God, for looking over us this morning. And thank you, Nadine, for being such a good neighbor and missing church yourself to help the Fox family.

PS. Yes we did remember to go back and collect the big boys. We are crappy parents today. But not THAT crappy.