"Did you barricade the door?" "Why? Oh, the zombies. No."

It finally happened last night; Abbie finally locked me out of the house. She learned to shut doors months ago, and ever since I knew that one day she would lock me out of the house, preferably while fully clothed.

One of her favorite activities in the kitchen, assuming the dishwasher is closed, is shutting doors. If any cabinets are open, she’ll shut those tight. If the nearby front door is open, she’ll shut that tight. If the basement door is open, she’ll shut that tight unless the safety gate is in the way. If the refrigerator is open, she’ll open that door all the way to play in it because the refrigerator is stocked with a myriad of rare treasures, like the soy sauce bottle.

She exhibited her door shutting skills last night while I was doing laundry. We have a unique laundry situation in our home; our washing machine is installed in our basement, but our dryer is installed in our neighbor’s basement. We live in a duplex-type building with adjoining living spaces, so entering the neighbor’s basement is as simple as opening a door in the basement. While lugging wet clothes next door makes for an inconvenient laundry situation, the basement door does make my life simpler when I need someone to watch Abbie and I can shove her through the door hoping they won’t notice the extra child in their house until I return.*

I usually carry Abbie downstairs with me when I do laundry. That way instead of wondering why she’s screaming on the floor above me, she’ll be in front of me where I can watch her hurt herself and know exactly why she’s crying. While in the basement, she usually amuses herself by wandering around, taking in the staggering amount of clutter we’ve amassed, and corroborating with the cats to discover new ways to access their food. Sometimes she climbs up the basement steps, an action that requires me to swoop her up for safety and carry her back to the washing machine so I can continue with laundry for an additional 13.28 seconds until she runs right back to the steps.

Last night she was content to poke around our clutter. When I drug a load to the dryer, I called her to follow me to the neighbor basement. As long as she isn’t engrossed in a rousing session on the stairs, she usually follows me. The neighbors keep an immaculately clean basement sprinkled with a few toys that Abbie loves, like action figures and rubber balls that are completely different from the rubber balls we own.

While I stuffed clothes in the dryer, Abbie busied herself with the balls. I check on her periodically to make sure she wasn’t doing anything dangerous like bouncing the balls in a hazardous manner, but focused primarily on transferring clothes without dropping them. At one point I looked up and noticed she wasn’t in the neighbor’s basement anymore. Then I saw the connecting basement door starting to close.

The connecting door locks only from our basement. I always keep it locked because it just seems like a bad idea to have an unlocked door leading into our home. Someone could just walk into our home and make trouble at any time, even though that “someone” would have to be our neighbors who would never do such a thing. Thanks to that locked door, if our neighbors ever want to steal our clutter, they’ll just have to do it during one of the many times they baby-sit for us in our home.

I knew the door was locked when I saw it swing shut. Fortunately, Abbie just pushed it lightly shut so the door swung against the frame without latching; I could easily push it back open. Then, my reinforcement of “shut it tight, Abbie” every time she similarly shut a door without latching it came back to bite me in the butt as I saw the door suddenly pushed shut from the other side. I pushed on the door, but no luck; she locked me out of the house.

I stood dumbfounded, trying to decide what to do. I knew the door could be opened even when locked, so maybe I could find a way to wiggle the lock open. Abbie quickly found a reason to scream though, so I knocked on the neighbor’s upstairs door for one of the more fractured conversations in my life.

“I, uh, need upstairs. The door, uh, locked. Abbie is screaming. Um. She pushed the door. Uh, Abbie locked me out of the house.”

I bounded out their front door and back into our house. I was fully clothed except for a lack of shoes, so the trip outside would have been tolerable if it weren’t so cold. Back in the house, I discovered Abbie was fine in spite of my negligent parenting; she was just upset that no one else was around, possibly because she wanted to show off her door shutting skills.

* The neighbors have seven children, as of right now. It’ll be eight in a few months.