You won't believe this...

I'm surprised that I didn't think to blog about this sooner! This is one of those strange stories that I would expect to hear happened to someone else. Not me.

Three Sundays ago, I think, we came back from church and lunch at McDonald's. (Now a couple of you know where I'm going with this!) Actually, the boys and I came home, while Adam and our friend Dave, who was staying with us for the weekend, went to watch a football game. (Not having cable is problematic when you need to watch a football game...you can't do it in your own house!) Anyway, so the boys and I walk in our front door, and I'm getting ready to take Levi upstairs and put him down for nap. Drake asks if he can play in the backyard. Well, sure. Why not? So out he goes. Five seconds later, he's back. And he's asking, "Mommy, why are all those toys outside?" "What toys?" (I'm confused.) "My cars and Bionicles and some books, too."

Oh...no...

A thought crosses my mind - but I push it out. Impossible. Neighbor children inside our house while we're gone?

Oh yeah.

That's right. While we were out, two neighbor boys from down the street (ages seven and three), not only came into our backyard, but came through our sliding glass door (which I had obviously failed to lock) and into our house, taking some of the toys from the playroom and the living room back out to the yard to play with. What?! Even when the pieces started coming together (including an incriminating eye-witness account from the neighbors directly behind us), I was still in shock. The weird thing is, we barely know these kids! And I had never even met the parents. We'd been seeing a lot of them over the few days prior, which is really the only factor that made the story seem plausible at first. But it was indeed true.

Several questions came to mind. A lot of them actually. Where all did these children go in my home? (Hopefully not through my underwear drawer.) Am I overreacting? Like, is this something one should expect if they forget to lock their sliding door? (Ummm...no.) What would have happened if we had owned a kid-eating doberman? (Could I live with that?) Or what if they had just fallen off our swing set in the backyard and sprained an ankle or something? (Our insurance would be paying for it, I'll tell you that. The US government would make sure of it.) And how about this: Where were Mom and Dad, and did they even have a clue what their children had been up to that morning?

So anyway, I went and introduced myself and (very politely) discussed the situation with the boys' parents (who were both home at the time of the incident, by the way). In the parents' defense, Dad had just returned home from a deployment, and things tend to get a little crazy during that readjustment phase. The boys had been playing outside, and when Dad went looking for them, found them in our yard and made them come home. (The parents had no idea they had been in our house, but the little one readily confessed!)

After that, I immediately called my friend, Cherie. I needed to burden someone else with my bizarre story! And by the end of the conversation I was feeling, well, a little more normal and less shocked. And reallyreallyreally thankful that our "intruders" were little kids who just borrowed toys from inside our house - they didn't even take them. It could easily have been something oh so very much worse!

So anyway, now we have locks on the backyard gates and try to remember to lock the sliding door, pretty much whenever it's not in use. And just in time, too. Because yesterday I forgot to lock the door, and Levi figured out how to open it. I found him happily playing in the yard by himself, with the door wide open. Well, at least he couldn't get out of the yard!