I knew I needed to blog about this as soon as my friend Brandon showed up with an ax. It’s not every day that a friend is welcomed to your house with cheers when he steps out of his car clutching an ax, is it?

It was August 2oth, 2011 – the day of our first baby shower. Becki’s twin sister Katie helped host it, and our church lovingly hosted a second one a few weeks later. This blog post is not about baby showers though.

The day started off with a phone call from Katie. She frantically relayed the news to my wife that the power was out in the home of the woman who was hosting the shower, which meant the location of the shower would probably need to be renegotiated. Since I have taken plenty of showers in the dark simply because I am too lazy to flip the light switch, I figured the girls could do the same. As it is, whenever I hear the words “shower” and “electricity” mentioned together, I think of electrocution. So who needs a baby shower with electricity? The baby is certainly not going to notice that the lights are out. It’s not like Baby Evie had a floor lamp tucked away in my wife’s uterus. 

Something you should know: It is never a good idea to spring news like this on a pregnant woman. Her steely resolve will become molten, and her emotional blacksmith will forge that liquid metal into a sword,  and that sword will soon become well acquainted with your internal organs.

Katie was doing the best she could, of course, as she could hardly call anyone in Lawrence and ask for an alternate shower location. She lives in Milwaukee, where baby showers are most frequently relocated when the state of Wisconsin’s surplus of beer and cheese threaten to submerge a shower location in something like beer cheese soup. So she called Becki, not really knowing any other Lawrencians, and knowing all too well that this would hardly register as good news in her sister’s mind.

After the hearing the news from my wife, who flailed her arms about as if she were preparing for flight, I contemplated hiding in the cats’ litter-box room, as I knew the prospect of toxoplasmosis during pregnancy would keep her far from the olfactory overload of this particular refuge.

Thus began a Saturday that knew no courtesy whatsoever.

The power eventually came back on at the host’s house, but the entire incident set both Becki and myself on edge. My parents had been in town all week, staying in the guest room in the bowels of our house and feeding us enticing treats as if they planned to fatten us up and eat us. In addition to Katie and her husband Matt, Becki’s brother Jon and his wife Jessie were also in town. By 10:00 a.m., our house was filled with family. Two parents plus four siblings (in-laws or otherwise) plus Becki (who counted as two people), myself, and our five cats = Fourteen heartbeats in our house. 

My mom was in her default mode, talking as if talking had the power to keep ships from sinking, and talking as if the Titanic were going down before her very (big brown) eyes. Dad was there, too – ever his quiet, studious self, only opening his mouth to tease Becki and Katie about their Wisconsin accents. Of course, he taught my sister Alyssa and me to pronounce the words “milk” and “pillow” as “melk” and “PELL-ow,” so his own lexicon had been compromised, either by his youth in Indiana or his adulthood in the Ozarks . Mom was not immune to mispronunciations either – she taught us to pronounce the word “nursery” as “NURSH-ree.” Who knows what infernal words Becki and I will teach Evie to mispronounce? (If I have not said it already, our baby is doomed. She will file for emancipation at age 5.)

With all the girl talk of baby showers in the air, Matt, Jon, Dad, and I decided to exit the estrogen-saturated house and eat at Papa Keno’s in downtown Lawrence. Papa Keno’s serves pizza slices bigger than human heads. As a business, it is eternally teetering on the precipice of bankruptcy. That day, half of the restaurant’s fountain sodas were out of order, several key toppings were mysteriously unavailable, and the seats in the booth where we chose to sit were broken. It was like dining in a car crash that happened en route to bringing pizza home for dinner. Still, the pizza itself made the whole restaurant-in-decline thing seem like something fashionably dysfunctional. It was delicious as always.

Mid-bite, we received a phone call that changed the course of the day. If memory serves correctly, Katie called Matt and told him the shower-going womenfolk were locked out of our house. Which meant we were locked out of our house. 

You’re probably thinking, “But you have your keys with you, and probably your garage door opener in your car as well, right?”

Normally, you would be right. But in this case, you are missing two crucial pieces of information. Yes, I had my keys with me, but Dad had driven us to Papa Keno’s, so my garage-door opener was in my car, which was in the garage at home. The girls had car-pooled to the shower in one of the other shower-goers’ vehicles, meaning Becki’s car was also securely locked in our garage.

Second, there is the not-so-small matter of the locks (plural) on our front door. Becki and I always lock the dead-bolt. We never turn the lock on the doorknob itself because we have no key for it. Which is stupidity on par with pre-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the freezer case at the grocery (“GROW-shry” according to Mom) store. 

Becki’s good friend Jen was the last person to leave our house, then, and she thought it would be a good idea to turn the lock on the doorknob before shutting the door. Normally, this would be a good idea. But with this small action, Jen locked everyone out of the house and effectively turned control of the house over the cats. I was sure they would turn our entire split-level home into one luxurious litter box. “It’s like a beach,” they would say, “but with litter instead of sand. Litter everywhere!”

Upon returning to our house, we pizza-eating men all transformed into MacGyver.

I cut through the mesh netting on our screened-in porch with one of my car keys so I could reach in and unlock the door from the other side. That initial obstacle down, we then attempted to unlock the sliding-glass door on the screened-in porch but found that none of my keys opened it either.

“I’ve opened doors like these a thousand times,” my brother-in-law Matt said. “You just have to figure out where the lock catches on the side of the door.”

“Yeah,” my brother-in-law Jon seconded. “That’s right. I invented sliding glass doors, Matt. Anybody have a shrimp fork? I can jostle it open with a shrimp fork.” (Jon never actually said this.)

But neither Matt nor Jon nor Dad nor myself could open that door. We lifted and pulled and grunted with constipated looks on our faces, but it never budged more than a little.

Becki and I lacked keys to two doors on our house. What was wrong with us? 

Matt tried scaling a decaying wooden ladder to reach the back deck on our bathroom, only to find he could not open the door to our bathroom with my keys either. (Yes, we have a deck that comes out of our bathroom. It overlooks an overgrowth of poison ivy and enough foliage to make the Amazon rainforest look like an underachieving ecosystem.) 

Make that three doors on our house that neither Becki nor myself can open from the outside when they are locked. 

After attempting to free the doorknob from the door on the front of the house with a sizable brick that happened to be laying nearby, we called a locksmith for an estimate, puttered around some more, and finally resorted to calling my friend Brandon, who owns many tools.

He showed up at our house with a pry-bar and, more memorably, the aforementioned ax.

Within seconds, my dad dislodged the doorknob from the door with the pry-bar, as if Baptist ministers are so accustomed to opening peoples’ hearts to Jesus that opening a locked door was simply a trick of the clerical trade. 

We never used the ax, but we entered the house. The cats had to take down their “Long live Fidel Catstro” banners and return control of the house to us hapless humans.

Becki returned from the shower frazzled, but happy that my dad – the Baptist minister – could burgle with the best of them. She was also happy that we had purchased and installed a new doorknob from Ace Hardware, which meant there were only two doors on the house we could not open from the outside with keys.

Which means someday I will write another blog post just like this one. Or more realistically, two more blog posts just like this one.