And by “this”, I mean a ridiculous, embarrassing, kind of scary, could-only-happen-to-me new-house moment.
I thought it’d take longer than five days, in any case.
Yesterday afternoon I was hanging out in my office (!) with Indy, sort of half-putting away things and half-reciting Sneetches on Beaches from memory while he sat on the floor turning pages (it’s his favorite book of all time). We don’t have A/C anywhere except for in the master bedroom (the house is shaded by lots of trees, and is cool enough that a couple of fans seem to mostly do the trick for now)…so after awhile I got hot and decided to pick up the baby and step out onto the second-story patio to stand in the breeze for a minute.
Except the patio is small, extremely high up (it overlooks a recessed part of the yard), and unsafe (it has widely-spaced railings that are totally not OK for small dogs and babies; we’re adding plexiglass to them this weekend), so I shut the door behind me to keep Lucy and Virgil from joining us outside.
Except I didn’t realize that the door locks.
Automatically.
From inside.
So there I was: mid-afternoon, all alone in a completely silent neighborhood where I know exactly no one, trapped on a teeny patio holding a baby who absolutely could not be put down for even a second thanks to the aforementioned unsafeness.
With no food or water or cell phone.
I started getting all Worst-Case-Scenario-Foreseeing, and pictured myself standing there for hours and hours, unable to move more than two feet in any direction, my panicky baby in my exhausted, shaking arms, until Kendrick finally came home, himself in a total panic because I hadn’t answered my cell phone or picked him up from the train station. That would not have been fun.
So I started yelling.
I did the “HELLO? I NEED SOME HELP! IS ANYONE THERE?!” thing, completely scaring the pants off of my son, and after about ten minutes the loveliest man in the world walked through the woods into our backyard and came to our rescue by entering my house from downstairs and unlocking the patio door. I can think of ways that I’d rather introduce myself to my neighbors than by screaming my head off and having them discover their new local space case stranded on a balcony with a baby, but hey.
Later on, though, I killed a fairly enormous spider all by my lonesome without freaking out very much at all, so I figure that balances things out a bit on the Competency Scale.
