Toddler Disappearance
This morning I woke up and began freaking the hell out. Lets backtrack a bit here. I take Randy to work every morning and Gracie and I get home around 8:15 and go back to bed. We live in a mobile home park. So she goes to bed around 8:30 and I join her at 9am. Usually she wakes up before me and it’s fine because she doesn’t get into anything or do anything that would concern me.
Today was a different story. I woke up and the front door was open and the screen was shut. This meant she opened the door and went outside. She can’t open the screen door from the outside. I run outside barefoot in my pajamas and start calling her name frantically. I see no sign of her anywhere. We have a large pond right next to our trailer and if you walk through the trees in the other direction you come to a very large creek.
I called my mother-in-law and tell her Gracie opened the door and I can’t find her so she heads over with my FIL and in the meantime I drive to the office to ask the manager if she had seen her because there are only 16 trailers in the park. They know who Gracie is and she told me she saw her playing on our steps about 15 minutes ago and she thought it was odd because she was alone. She goes to start looking for her and I drive back and my in-laws arrive and we all start looking. I went through the paths in the woods calling her name and the manager actually found her walking on the other side of the park. She had gone through the paths in the woods and was walking along the main highway.
That was the scariest parenting experience I’ve ever had in my life. My FIL immediately went to the store to look for a child safety lock and didn’t find anything so he got a chain lock to place up high where she can’t reach it since she’s mastered the other lock. He also looked for an alarm but wasn’t able to find one.
Needless to say, I won’t be forgetting to lock that chain when we return home everyday.