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“What are you doing?” I ask my husband nervously.

“I’m drilling a lock into the door of my closet.”

Ok.  I remain quiet while he drills another hole into the (rented) door frame.

“Sweetie? Can I ask you why?”

“Well, when we’re away this summer-I think we should lock up anything valuable in this closet.”

I pause to organize my response.  I want to say:

A. we don’t have anything valuable that will fit in that closet.

B. the people coming to stay while we’re away are:
-a friend who’s sending her kid down the street to a money camp
-the babysitters
-my father

and C. if someone wanted to steal something they could rip that lock right out of the drywall.

(Before I was allowed to publish this post I was instructed to inform the reader that the lock was, in fact, screwed into the steel door frame AND the screws are inaccessible when the lock is closed.)  !!

Then it dawns on me. When my husband was a young bachelor he went to an auction at Sotheby’s and bought a suit of armor for reasons unbeknownst to those of us closest to him. We tease him about it relentlessly-RELENTLESSLY, even though we all secretly love it.

“Do you want to put the helmet from your suit of armor in there?”

“Well-yes,” he stammers, “that and, well,” he pauses because he can’t think of anything else, “anything else we think is valuable,” he blurts out.

I stifle a giggle when I think how hard the babysitter will laugh when I tell her this story. She and her best friend babysit our two-year-old.  We adore them both-so much so, they’ll stay in our apartment while we’re away to be closer to some of their other charges.

The next time she’s over I say, “Look what my husband did to the closet.”

“Why did he do that?” she asks, “Does he want to lock up that crazy helmet?”

Since we’ve been away we’ve received the following messages:

TEXT #1

TEXT #2

(The little man had his first ER visit last week after he dove into a coffee table. Three stitches.)

TEXT #3