I was very excited when my daughter started preschool. With all three kids now spending at least a few hours a week learning outside the home, it now meant I had a little more guilt-free time to spend on my business and more importantly volunteer in classrooms.
That fateful day started out like any ordinary day. Grade two son up, fed and teeth brushed. Same for SK son, after the usual battle about whether this was a school day or not – he hadn’t taken well to full-day alternate-day kindergarten. A third checkmark for my three year old daughter and with a quick glance at the day’s headlines and a big cup of hot black coffee for me we were out the door
That day, the two hours I spent in my younger son’s classroom passed faster than I expected and when I looked at the clock, I was already 5 minutes late to pick up my daughter. I frantically washed up from the painting supervision I was doing and left a message on the preschool answering machine. I was president of the co-op school after all, so I figured this one lapse could be overlooked, even if it did cut into the teacher’s lunch time just a little bit. I grabbed my winter coat, thrust my feet into boots and rushed out to my car, digging my keys out of my purse as I hurried along.
And then it happened.
As I pulled my hand out of my purse, the keys slid from my hand and fell – in slow motion just like the movies – into a storm sewer grate.
Heart in my throat, I called the preschool again, begged forgiveness and started calling girlfriends to collect my child. Nobody was home (presumably picking up their little ones already) and this was in the days before cell phones were a common accessory.
Fortunately, we live only a 10 minute walk from the elementary school. I rushed home. It wouldn’t take me too long to find the extra set of car keys. Now, if only I hadn’t locked the front door.
I opened the back gate and my heart sank when I realized that for once in my life I had actually remembered to lock the side door into the garage, and the sliding patio door. The only thing left to do was break in through the study window. Now, fortunately, I’m from a small town and locking up windows is not something that would necessarily be front of mind. So it wasn’t as difficult as you’d think to pry open the window and wiggle the screen open.
Climbing in was a little trickier. But it got done and the spare keys were found. I rushed back to the school, started the car and drove a little more quickly than I probably should have to the preschool. Of course, my daughter was having a great time and never realized I was late. Home we went, ate lunch and then she began her afternoon nap.
Nap time gave me time to try and figure out how on earth I was going to rescue the keys. Nothing I owned was long enough to reach the bottom, so a hook was out of the question. Were keys magnetic? No. There went the magnet idea. Finally, it dawned on me that while the keys themselves weren’t magnetic, the heavy key ring they were on was. So the search for heavy magnets was on, along with some way to attach them to a string I could lower down. It took a bit of doing, and some trial runs over the banister, but I finally thought I might be able to make this work. Of course, it was now time to start collecting the boys as the school day was over.
We returned to school, magnets and string in hand to fish out the keys just as the end-of-day bell rang. My audience grew larger as the kids watched this crazy lady dangling something down the sewer. Waving the string around a bit, I finally made contact with the key ring. I felt the magnet grab hold. Slowly, I started pulling up the string, holding my breath the whole time. Closer and closer they came until a little hand could reach in and manoeuvre the keys through the grate.
The gathered children all thought it was pretty cool — both that it worked, and that I’d thought to try in the first place. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. And at the end of the day, large glass of red wine in hand, I realized I’d taught my own kids a valuable lesson in independence and creativity – and maybe it was their own Mum who was that mother of invention!
