Modern Day Pilgrims

Monday, March 24, 2014

To the Rescue!

My knight in shining armor had to come and rescue Titus and I today.  Titus locked me outside of the house from our back yard and I could not explain to Titus how to unlock and open the door.  You must be thinking, "Couldn't you have just hopped the fence or gone to the front of the house?"  Well, let me try to explain, although this will be difficult since there's not really a way to compare this to anything in the states.  Our backyard is completely fenced in by the neighboring houses, and there is no way to get to the front of the house from our backyard.  If you managed to jump a fence, you would then be stuck in your neighbor's backyard.  Our neighbor facing the street has an entire line of trees along their fence, so if you managed to jump our fence to get into their backyard, you would then have to get over another fence and then climb a few trees.  Not. going. to. happen.  So there is no gate or anything of the sort, like in the states.  It is literally completely fenced in.  The only way to get to our backyard or to get into the house from our backyard is through the back door.  To make this scenario even more frustrating, our back door has a door handle that you can access from the inside of the house but there is not a door handle on the outside.  I don't know who thought this was a good idea, if it was placed there for security reasons or what, but you can get out to the backyard but not back in if the door somehow gets locked.  To make things more complicated, the door's "lock" is not traditional.  It locks by turning the handle up so that the handle faces up and down instead of side to side.  There's not really a "lock" in the traditional sense of the term, as there's no place to put a key and there's no way to pick it.  So how did this happen?  I was trying to do some beautifying to our backyard and decided that some gardening was in order (yay for Spring!).  I made sure to leave the door wide open, but without my noticing, Titus started playing with the door.  I didn't think he would actually figure out how to lock it since the doors are more complicated here, as explained above, but alas, Titus unintentionally figured it out.  And he couldn't undo it, despite my coaxing and attempts at explaining to push the handle down.  Titus got more and more scared and cried uncontrollably as time went on since he could see me but could not get to me and I could see him but could not get to him.  Thankfully, after 20 minutes of ever increasing panic and frustration, a neighbor heard me, rightly assumed where my husband worked, called my hubby's work, and then Chris came to our rescue.  The whole ordeal lasted about an hour and a half.  Titus was so shaken up that when Chris walked through the front door, he cried even harder.  I think he thought he was either hearing things or that Chris somehow managed to get stuck outside with me too.  Poor thing.  He continued to cry the most heart-wrenching, scared cry for at least 5 minutes in daddy's arms after Chris arrived and let me inside.  I hope nothing like this happens again.  While I'm not holding my breath that they'll switch out our ridiculous back door, we did come up with a plan to make sure it doesn't happen again.  I quipped to Chris that this is the safest country we have ever lived in, yet ironically, this house is the hardest to get in and out of.  :-/  Life in Poland, I guess!