Longer Than Anticipated Time Out

This evening Shawn decided my shoulder looked like a tasty treat so he decided to take a little nibble. I immediately took him to his room and shut the door. His door fits pretty tight and he hasn't quite got the leverage to open it making it a fantastic place to separate him for a bit. Well, I went to get him out a few moments later and the door would not open. The handle on his door is unlike the others in the house. It doesn't even match in color. It works with a key but there is no key for it. It's a small eyesore; obviously someone got a really cheap deal on a new door knob at some point. So I got Mark and he immediately wanted to kick the door in. I was like, "Oh no. No. Let's just stay calm." So I tried my hardest to coax Shawn in to figuring out how to turn the little lock on the inside. He couldn't reach it well so I told him to push his plastic toy box over to the door. Well, he got hurt doing that and started to cry. But it didn't sound too bad and he recovered quickly. So then I got him to get the pillows off the bed and stack them at the door which he actually did and I proceeded to talk him through the parts of the door handle. Um. . . it didn't work so well. He could not figure out how to turn the little lock piece and I'm not sure he ever even understood what little knob I was talking about. I had just moments before shut his window blinds in preparation for bedtime so we couldn't even go outside and see what he was doing. He started to cry so we got him some snacks and fed him under the door. That helped a lot. Mark got the drill and tried to drill holes through the base of the doorknob. That worked, but the doorknob still wouldn't budge. He tried prying the base of the knob off. That didn't work. He tried pounding a screwdriver through the middle of the knob with a mallet and that didn't work. Every so often Shawn would quietly call, "Hep me! Hep me!" Oh! It was sad. Finally Mark just took the mallet and busted the handel off and we still could not get the lock to budge. In the end guess how the door was opened? We said, "Okay Shawn move away. Go jump in your crib!" and Mark kicked the door in ripping part of the moulding off all the way from the top of the door frame to the floor! This doorknob was ridiculously strong! (I later took it apart and removed it from the door. I'm pretty sure this doorknob was meant to be on the front door of a home . . . not a child's bedroom.) And the first thing I said to Shawn was, "Are you going to bite again?" He said, "No!" immediately.

By the way, we have no idea how the door got locked. We've never found it locked before today. Of course it is our fault that we didn't get it replaced before today, but then if we had already done it, we wouldn't have had any excitement this evening.