Useful Tip #325

Keep a spare key somewhere outside of your house.
Or better yet, take keys with you when:

*You go out to chip away 3" of accumulated ice on your driveway, so that you can correct yesterday's mistake of skating on your ass to put your kid on the bus.

*Then while chipping away that 3" of ice, you try to help out a neighbor that is stuck on your street on the sheet of ice(which your kid's bus got stuck on yesterday on the way to school & had to be bailed out & the kids were a 1/2 hour late for school on account of your kid going to school & your house is on a slight incline. And vehicles, ice and inclines don't go together). You chip away under the tires, you push their vehicle, you spread salt under their tires. All in an attempt to be a good neighbor. (which at this point, in my mind is way over-rated).

*It is fricking freezing outside. I mean like windchills are in the teens & single digits.

*After all of that, you make your way back to the house (from the street, in front of your house), you're freezing, you have frozen snot running down your face, you can't feel your thighs anymore because you are so cold. All you want to do is get back in the house.
And you can't.

Because the kids have locked you out.

And you know they can't open the door because you have (like a good mother) installed the plastic safety doorknob covers over the doorknobs so they can't make that great escape they've been planning that they hope will land you on The World's Worst Mothers List.

*You panic. No cell phone. The gates to the backyard are frozen shut. You have to hop the fence in your semi-frozen state. Beat & pound, pound & beat on the back door. Where your four-year-old stands looking up at you in dismay. You scream through the glass of the back door (and now all of your neighbors know you're an idiot b/c your kids have locked you out of the house when hell has literally frozen over), that he has to go & get a stool, and turn that big lock on the top of the back door. And you think this is damn near impossible as he has had Occupational Therapy for almost 2 years and still struggles with the pincer grasp on his pencil, so how in the hell is he going to have enough strength in his little fingers to turn this big, ass lock??

But he does it.

And upon re-entering your home, said four-year-old turns to his two-year-old sister and says:
Gracie! Don't you dare lock mommy out of the house ever, ever again!

So there, Gracie! He.told.you.

In a nutshell, that is why you need to use your brain. Plant a key outside somewhere. Or like I said, take keys with you outside. Because just when you think your kids would never lock you out.
They sure as hell will.

The End.