An Exciting Evening at Stary Latka

Our middle son showed up unexpectedly this afternoon with our 10 yr old grandson and 6 yr old granddaughter. Within minutes, I had four strings of beads around my neck, I've played with Tinker Toys for the first time in decades, and I tried to introduce our grandson to Sabaton, a Swedish metal band that I like, but he was having none of that! 

The excitement started innocently enough. The granddaughter took the skeleton key out of the basement door, which was locked. Since we thought all the spare keys were hanging just inside the door, grandma made sure we had a spare available and told her it was OK to play with it.

An hour or so later she managed to lock herself in the bathroom! We had the spare key, but we live in a century old house, which we call 'Stary Latka', Czech for 'Old Things', because it's full of old things, including the occupants. All the rooms have skeleton key locks on the doors, including the closet door in my room. And, wouldn't you know it, this was the moment that 100 year old lock on the bathroom door chose to jam! Of course, it probably hadn't been locked for most of that 100 years.

No amount of playing with the spare key in the lock would move it. Luckily, our son is a union carpenter. He managed to open the door with minimal damage by removing a strip of molding. I'm sure he'll fix it tomorrow.

When the little one finally was released from her unintended prison, she ran immediately to grandpa for a hug. She was devastated, but we assured her that someday, many years hence, she would tell the story to her grandchildren and they would all laugh at the time their grandma locked herself in the bathroom!