If you spill a box of spaghetti...

     I knew I was too tired to function when I absentmindedly leaned over to straighten the baby gate and poured out half a box of dry spaghetti.
     I know the box was closed when I bought it, children had put it in the cart and on the conveyor at check-out, and no open package will survive that. Also I was pretty sure that it had been closed moments before when I had fished it out of the bags in the car and walked in with it, which was just before the moment that I had leaned over to fix the baby gate. Therefore I must have opened said box somewhere between the car and the house without knowing it.
     A mom on autopilot is not a good thing... in so many ways.

They look harmless...

     After I finished taking care of cooking the rest of the spaghetti, (I was making dinner for our church so it really couldn't be put off), I herded all the kids into my middle childs room, the neatest, most baby friendly room in the house, handed the kids an ipod with instructions to watch two Mickey Mouse cartoons, no more, (that's all we had time for before we needed to leave for church,) and lay down on the floor to take a power nap.
     The older two were happy with the cartoon and the youngest went back and forth between bothering his siblings and poking at me. In spite of all this, and the fact that I was lying on the floor, I was out in no time. A testament to how deep my exhaustion went.
     A blissful and peaceful moment.
     I was suddenly very awake when a vaguely familiar shooting pain exploded from my nose. The familiar feeling was my youngest son shoving his finger as hard as he could up my nose. I wish I could say this was the first time this had ever happened, but I can't.  I can say that this was the first time that I had woken up to it, though. I wish I knew why he did it, but I don't. I even wish that I could say that I woke up kindly and without shoving the assaulting infant away from me, but yeah right.

I got your nose!

     Well, now I was awake, very awake, and I knew what was coming next, my nose was bleeding, majorly bleeding. As I attempted to staunch, or catch, or divert the flow from my clothes, my children, and/or the carpet, my oldest began to freak out. He doesn't like blood. Trying to speak over the budding hysterics and dripping, I asked him to get toilet paper, or a washcloth, or anything from the other room for me.
     This is where it got interesting.
     I hear the clunk clunk of the doorknob, and the worried, "Uhhhh" of my son. "It's locked." he says.
     'That's crazy, who would lock the door, while we were all on the inside'.
     The spaghetti incident did not bode well for that train of thought so I moved on to train of thought B-
     'Can't be'.
     Assuming that he was just over reacting to the blood I fumble for the knob myself and find that it indeed is locked.

     Locked...
     My phone... in the other room...
     My husband... on his way to church
     The lockpick... not above the door

     In quick succession all my solutions were flying out the door that I couldn't get open.
     So I sat there, dripping blood, trying to figure out how to use the ipod to get a message to my husband while the kids scoured the room for something long and thin enough to pick the lock.

     Did I mention that this was the cleanest, most baby friendly room in the house?

     No such luck.

     One of the older ones had smuggled in one of the sticks of spaghetti, I had missed a few when I cleaned up the first disaster of the afternoon, but the piece was a little too short and I was afraid it would break off in the lock and ruin all of our future chances.
     Finally my eyes lit on the window.

     Had I left the front door unlocked?

     It was the one window with no screen so that wasn't the problem. Would I be able to fit my large bleeding self through that opening, into the rose bush that was planted just in front of it?

     No way.

     But my oldest could fit!
     I lowered him out the window, and around the bush, trying not to bleed on him... where he would see it... and he ran around the corner of the house.
     A few long seconds later we hear the rattle of the door knob, this time from the outside and resolving with that beautiful final clunk that meant that it was now unlocked.
     "I rescued you!" he exclaimed as he bounced through the door.

     Nodding to his self accolades I run to the shower to clean off and to avoid making a bigger mess while the bleeding stopped. Soon all was cleaned up and we were finally on our way.

Best excuse...ever.

     This is why dinner for the church was late but...
 
 you have to admit that this is one of the best excuses you've heard in a really, really, long time.