Ifta7 ya simsim

All the doors to the bedrooms upstairs have locks on them. I suppose this was a very good thing when this house was teeming with adolescents—who wrongly assumed that privacy is a right. It's not. In fact, privacy doesn't exist at all. We've know that now that we have children of our own. We also know that locks on bedroom doors are a very bad idea when you have small children.

A couple of hours after waking up this morning Miriam started acting grumpy so I decided that she might want a nap. I got her all ready for nap time and went into the girls' room to put her down. Rachel came in to "help" me by turning off the light. She also closed the door when we left the room.

Miriam cried for a minute and then quieted down.

Approximately 45 minutes later I went to check on her. I crept up to her door, stealthily pur my hand on the knob, silently twisted, and...nothing. I grasped the handle and twisted again, this time a little more forcibly. Again, nothing. I wiggled the handle in both directions. It was stuck tight.

I went into the kitchen where Rachel was—mostly to get the nail out of the drawer (we have to keep a nail in the drawer because this happens to the bathroom at least once a week)—and said, "Rachel, were you playing with the lock on your door?"

She didn't answer me but started humming nervously.

"Your door is locked. And your sister is inside."

"I didn't mean to! I'm sorry! You can fix it. You know how. I know you do!"

"It's fine. I just have to unlock it. Please stop playing with the locks, though."

"I'm sorry!"

I stuck the nail in the little hole and fidgeted with it to find the spring to unlock the door. Unfortunately, I could not find it. I called Andrew over to help me and he couldn't find it either so I went and got Karen and she couldn't find it either.

We practiced unlocking the office door because it has the same lock as the girls' room. It opened on the first try. We tried the same thing on the girls' room but had no luck. We broke out screw drivers and were getting rather frustrated by the time we finally managed to pop the lock (only to find that Miriam had slept soundly through the whole ordeal).

I'm so glad that we can manage to lock our baby in her room for a nap but can't even close our door to get dressed without having children pounding and wailing at it. If we can't learn to leave the locks alone we may be in the market for a new doorknob...