A Near Death Experience

Love Seattle on a sunny day (really any day)!

I mentioned this on Facebook the other day but I thought it deserved it's own blog post.

From our day at The Children's Museum, Seattle

Our day started out innocently enough. The girls woke us up around their usual time, somewhere between 8-9 am. Ralph headed straight out to the grocery store to pick up milk and coffee, two morning necessities.

She loved the slide.

I proceeded to change the girls' diapers. Zita went first, while Nugget played. One of their combined favorite games is to play with the bedroom door. This may be one of my least favorite games. So, of course, Nugget was playing with the door while I changed Zita's VERY STINKY diaper. Occasionally, despite regular stripping, their cloth diapers will emit a terrible ammonia smell in the morning on top of the other stinkiness that often occurs. I apologize if this is all TMI. Well, this was one of those mornings where both of their diapers reeked of ammonia and poo.

Such a sweetie.

After Zita was destinkified, it was Nugget's turn. While I was changing Nugget and answering her litany of early morning questions, Zita started playing with the door. She takes great pride in being able to shut the door. I was hoping to get the morning off to a happy start so I was ignoring the door playing as I can move into irritation mode quite early in the morning (seriously WHY do they find that so fun but I find it extremely annoying?!). Add that to the fact that we are not morning people, Nugget's litany of morning questions usually tax my brain to it's pre-coffee limit.

She loves being beautiful!

Well, Nugget was destinkified, but the room was quite toxic at that point due to Zita having closed the door all the way. The window was open as I was hoping to wash the room with the fragance with the cool, early (for us) morning scent. I wasn't really noticing any change. I picked up the girls, grabbed the door handle and realized it was locked. Bummer. I reached up to grab the bobby pin we store in there for just such an occasion but found it missing!

A budding artist.

Now I'm getting concerned. We're running out of fresh air, making thinking quite difficult. My husband was at the grocery store. We were home alone and trapped. I had my phone so I called Ralph. He has just gotten to the grocery store and offered to come rescue us. I thought that would be silly for him to come home empty handed just to leave again so I declined the rescue. I was regretting that within seconds and began searching for something to open the door. I found one of those diaper safety pins. I wasn't sure it would work. Thankfully, it did. We were free. Not a minute too soon, I was gagging and coughing. While Nugget kept repeating, "What's wrong, Mommy?" Ufdah. Coffee needed ASAP.

Our hero and would-be rescuer