Dad-Type Man Strength to the Rescue

There are advantages to having a stay-at-home dad around the house as opposed to a stay-at-home mom. Probably many advantages--though I can't really think of any others, and even this one is an incredible stretch.

Today, we had our first real emergency in quite some time. We've had many minor emergencies. Like when Norah discovered that she could climb over the back of the couch on the short ends and ended up toppling head first over the back. She landed without harm thanks to the pile of blankets and pillows, but she also landed with her head buried in the pillows so she couldn't move and had a proper freak out because of it. Valuable lessons about gravity and chubby, not entirely dexterous body parts learned. And there have been plenty of slammed fingers or pushings or pokings or what-have-yous. But no proper emergencies of the get-the-blood-flowing variety.

Until today. I left the kids upstairs to play for a little bit while I came down to sort some laundry. Norah's been enjoying the time up there for the past few weeks and Gabe loves it when I leave them alone up there because he can get up to no good without me noticing right away. And that's what he was doing. He decided that he needed to get into the drawers in the armoire. Yeah, the same armoire he broke the door off a few weeks back. The thing is proving to be quite a lot of trouble lately.

Anyway, he had no reason to get in the drawers because they just have some baby clothes we haven't gotten rid of yet and some extra sheets and stuff in them, but he likes to do things he's not supposed to for no other reason than to do them. And, of course, Norah joined in on the fun because she just loves to do whatever Gabe is doing.

"Daddy!" I hear from upstairs. "The door is stuck and Norah is trapped."

"Huh," I think. "That's not one I hear every day." So I run up the stairs figuring he's just closed a door tight and can't turn the knob for some reason or other.

Not so. What he had done, in fact, was close the door to Norah's bedroom. And, while the door was closed, Norah pulled the big bottom drawer in the armoire out behind it, effectively locking the door shut.

Now, as a stay-at-home DAD, I was able to perform a feat of strength that, I think, most women would not have been able to perform. Sure, sure. You hear the story about the adrenaline fueled mother lifting a car off her infant, but this was a different situation entirely. There was no real and immediate danger. Norah was trapped, and she would have gotten very unhappy about it before too long, but she wasn't in any danger (at least not until I started performing my feat of strength, then there might have been the potential for danger), so there wasn't an adrenaline surge to work with.

Because this armoire backs up to the headboard of the bed in the room, and that headboard has a slightly recessed area into which the armoire was backed into, I had to effectively push both the armoire and the bed back by sticking my arm through a three inch gap in the door. And I did. It took much grunting and Gabe probably picked up a few new curse words in the process, but, by god, I saved my child from a boring death in her own room! Hurray for brute man strength saving the day!

Now, this, of course, ignores the fact that my options for opening the door went as such.

First, upon seeing what was keeping the door from opening, I tried to push it in--resorting to man strength immediately to fix the problem. It did not budge easily. It didn't, in fact, budge at all (this was because it wasn't just the armoire but the bed--both of which are pretty hefty and I was completely lacking for leverage). So light exertion man strength wasn't going to solve the problem.

Second, I tried to push the drawer back into the armoire, thus allowing the door to freely swing open. This MIGHT have worked, except that my strengthy man arm was too wide to get in but a very short distance and I couldn't touch the drawer without pushing the door firmly against it. Thus, I couldn't close it because my own brute man strength was exacerbating the situation (at this point I actually thought to myself, "I wonder if I could call Libby and get her home before Norah completed freaked herself out since Libby has such nice, skinny, girly arms that could probably squeak past the door and move the drawer out of the way," but that is beside the point of all this entirely, I believe).

Third, I briefly considered finding something that I could slide in the crack in the door to latch onto the drawer and close it. This would have been physically impossible to do, however. And not even a woman could have done it. There was just no way to maneuver something around that tight of a corner, latch the drawer, and pull it closed. Directions and mass and propulsion and inertia all probably would have played a part and only a stay-at-home inventor could have figured out a way around it. So I put the plastic hanger down that I grabbed to try to do the job.

So, finally, with my options effectively being to call the fire department, call Libby and hope she could get home quickly, or give man strength another go, I went with man strength, hoping that I didn't hyper-extend myself or dislocate my brain pan and have to rely on my three year old to find the phone and dial 911 to save us all.

And I won! Take that stay-at-home moms who could not have done this thing I did!