all because my brain does not work properly anymore

Saturday dawned bright and beautiful. We had errands to run and things to do, so we only stayed home for morning nap time and out the door we went.

However, after said door was shut, like 4 seconds after, I needed to go back inside... for something I forgot. I used my key to unlock the door, and unlock it did, but open it did not.

humm, weird... OK, Cari, try again.

click, door unlocked, door still stuck in closed position.

Andy! The door is being stupid!

The captain comes to the rescue... except not really. The door is being stupid for him too.
And as he is banging on the door and ramming it with his football player sized shoulders, the preverbial lightbulb flashed on in my head.

STOP!!!! YOU WILL BREAK THE DOOR!!!

The day before I had been very brave and had 4 kids under my watch. All of whom can walk and move about on their own (well not all... Rigg is, thankfully, still stationary).  It had just occured to me what had happened. We have avery old-fashioned door. It has a very old-fashioned lock with very attractive looking buttons to push... if you are under 5. When the top button is pushed in, you have locked the door, and vise versa.

As I was standing outside on my front porch in the 27 degree weather it dawned on me that the top button was indeed in the "locked" position. And, funnily enough, we do not have a key for the bottom lock... HA HA HA!

FUNNY, huh, Andy?

He, funnily enough, was not laughing... or even smiling for that matter...

OK... what about the back door?  This is the part of the story where my brain takes a 15 minute nap and my body goes into autopilot.
The back door has 2 locks... a deadbolt, which we have a key for, and a chain lock... which we lock ALL THE TIME!
I unlock the back door and try to jimmy the chain lock... it is not working...SURPRIZE! ( I mean, that is why it is there in the first place, right?, to keep people from geting in?) So then I think, maybe if I can get the trim away from the wall enough to get my arm through...
well, as bad decisions always do...this turned out to be a fiasco. I did, indeed, get the trim away from the wall, I knocked that trim into oblivion along with some plaster and nails. It was a wonderful demolition job, if I do say so myself. I justified my actions by telling myself that we did need to get back into our house...so something would have to pay the price... sorry door trim, you were the price I had to pay...(now, thanks to my zelousness, we will have to literally pay for door trim at the home depot...)

After I basked in the O' so warm glow of my breaking and entering victory I was then smacked in the face by my stupidity. You see, we have a back landing, and once you enter the back door, you can either go downstairs to the basement, or through a kitchen door, which we keep locked from the inside, to get into main part of the house. Not needing anything from the basement, I chose the kitchen door...
which was locked...
from the inside.
Seeing as how I had already, worthlessly, demolished one of our doors, I chose not proceed with my caution to the wind behavior and take a minute to really assess my situation... as I stood ther in a foot of snow assessing... my brain clicked back on and I saw into our kitchen. One of our kitchen windows was unlocked. Great! Lovely!
So I called the captain over, breezily waved a hand at the shattered door trim and nonchalantly mentioned "that" route was not going to work. And in what I considered a very winning voice proclaimed that I had, however, found our anwer!
He was not so impressed with my handy work.

We then removed the storm window and pushed the inside window up. I held the captains coat and white shirt to keep them from getting dirty whilst we broke into our own home.

He shimmied through the open window with as much grace as he could muster while our very brave guard dog watched cowering in a corner with his tail between his legs.

After the captain opened the front door and very knowledgibly pushed the button to unlock the door from the inide I braved a slight chuckle.

Ha, kinda a fun adventure, huh?

The grunt and scowl I received in return was not promising. However, by the time we were back in the car and heading out on our merry way, we were both laughing about our stupid door.

Then I went to Kohls and bought a new vacuum and a cool green trench... and left with $50 in Kohls cash!

The end