Oh No....

Phil and I went and stayed in a hotel the other night and decided to get an adjoining room to stick Livi in. After she fell asleep we put her in her pack and play in the adjoining room, and just to be on the safe side we latched the main door of her room, the one that leads to the hallway.

The next morning Phil had stepped out and I was gathering our stuff together, when all of a sudden I hear a door close. I look over and see that one of the doors connecting the rooms was closed. In this adjoining room there were two doors. From "our" room there was a door you open and if the other room has their door closed it's just a flat door no way in. Then there is a door with the knob in the other room, the one I was not in and Livi was. I didn't immediately panic, my first thought was Livi knows how to open doors she can get back in. Then I realized that it was a knob which she can't maneuver yet. Next I thought, "I'll just go unlock the main door." But before I was even out of my room I remembered that I had latched her door the night before and my key would be useless. I started to panic a little bit. I found a housekeeper in the hallway and was trying to explain what happened but it was clear she wasn't understanding, luckily she spoke Spanish so I told her that my daughter had locked herself in the room. She said oh it's okay I have a card that works for all the doors. So I explained, using hand gestures and Spanish (how do you say latch in espanol?), that I had put the latch across the door and a key wouldn't work. She tells me I will have to call the front desk. I call them and they send up a maintenance guy and a manager. It's been about 5 minutes by now and Livi is knocking on the door and grunting, luckily she isn't crying. The workers got some hangers and were trying to unhook the latch, but that wasn't working, so one of them gets a small screw driver and he can barely reach his fingers in to start dismantling the whole latch. He was able to get 2 out of the 3 screws out. The guy tells me that he is just going to have to break the latch and to get Livi away from the door. I lured Livi away by sticking my fingers under the adjoining door and she grabbed my hand. I then hear the guy count to three and BANG! He ran into the door with his shoulder to break the latch away from the door frame. Thank heaven it didn't do any damage, they just had to replace the latch. They were really sweet about the whole thing and didn't even make me feel like a bad mother (which they very easily could have done.)

Hopefully that makes sense. It was much harder to describe than I thought it would be.

Even though I knew we were going to get her out it was 15 of the most stressful minutes of my life. I can't even imagine how terrifying it would be if she was in real danger.

This is the kind of latch I'm talking about

A really beautiful tree outside the hotel