Four boys--yikes

It's Sunday tonight and yesterday we had the four boys together. In age order, they are Joe, Drew, Eli, and Jackson. Joe and Eli yelled with delight when Jacqueline finally arrived (I made the mistake of promising them that she would arrive at noon, but upon assisted reflection, I remembered that it was much more open than that). So they arrived! So they ran in the leaves! So they played in the huge plastic vase that a boy can climb into and be rolled around in! They had leaf fights!

Before they arrived, my boys worked so hard with me to clean the house. Joe "got down on his knees and scrubbed pavement stones" as the poet William Butler Yeats puts it: Joe scrubbed the bathroom floor, toilet, tub, sink, mirror, and everything else. He was also very curious about the ways that the toilet valve worked, how it let in a certain amount of water when flushed and then stopped, so there was much gandering into the dark tidal pool of the toilet.

If I knew what was going to happen later, I would have put some apples and bread in the bathroom. But I'll get to that in a minute.

Eli helped me clean the music room, vacuuming, dusting, and making the futon there. I cleaned the living room and kitchen. The house looked good!

And then we raked the front lawn (to make a leaf pile for later), and there was some discussion about whether that was "fair," but we figured that out; the result was that Joe and Eli both helped with the good rakes to make the lawn look good.

The inside was clean (dishes done, bathroom done, music room done); the outside was clean (raked). Now what?

And as I mentioned Drew and Jackson arrived and ran around outside like banshees. Much excited yelling, happy exclaimation. I was puttering around inside, trying the an old skeleton key in various locks, and tried the bathroom lock from the inside.

That was a mistake.

The door locked fine, but the key would not turn to unlock. No unlock. NO UNLOCK. I was trapped in the bathroom. I had soap, shampoo, hot water and a lot of toilet paper. I would starve in there, but I would be clean, clean, clean. I tried the key until I bent it into a pretzle and broke it. I leaned out the window and Jacqueline passed me a pair of plier to my feet (I was dangling off the roof), and with them I took out the hinge pins and tried to take the door off the hinges. NO LUCK! I was still trapped, completely trapped. I bent and heaved, jostled and pried, but to no effect until Jacqueline followed my instructions to throw herself against the door and BAM! it came off the hinges.

Saved.

It was a rather exciting day, and Joe read through the entire thing; Eli watched with curiousity.