Island Packet — Two nights ago, at a little after midnight, we discovered that our 4-year-old son was not in his bed, which was bad, but not nearly as horrifying as finding, soon after, that he was also not in the house.
The boy, at some point between the last time we checked on him and 1:40 a.m., which was when my wife’s 911 call went out, woke up, got out of bed, went down the stairs, found his way to the back door in the dark, located two blue Crocs in a basket full of about 90 pairs of shoes, unlocked the sliding glass door, opened the sliding glass door, and went outside.
Those are all the facts we have in the case. But using skills that I have sharpened over several years of “CSI” viewing and reading a bunch of Sherlock Holmes, we’ve come up with this conjecture: Having closed the door behind him, the kid turned around into a warm, cloudy evening, ventured through the backyard to the road by the garage, turned left, probably tried to get down to Lexi’s house, got spooked, started running, got more spooked, started running some more and made it an impressive quarter-mile down the road.
At this point he was sprinting as much as ridiculous blue rubber shoes will allow, according to the two young guys who intercepted him, who, as near as I can figure, are the only two reasons he is not currently wandering around Yemasee.“I thought, ‘Yeah, that just ain’t right,’ ” one of them told me later. (I’m putting quotation marks on that, but I have no idea what he said; he could have been offering detailed schematics of the Starship Enterprise for all I heard.)
Anyway, these guys were youngish, probably twentysomething each, and by the time I got there they had him rather adorably seatbelted into the front seat and wrapped up in a blanket, which, coupled with the lights of the police car that pulled up right after I got there, made it seem like he had been street-racing with someone else’s sedan with a strange blanket, but at least he’d remembered to buckle up.
Cleverly, the boy was quick to offer an explanation for himself. “I was just out looking for those guys,” he said while being desperately scooped up by me, and though I’m pretty sure that was not the case, it did show an impressive skill at improv that he probably shouldn’t have at 4 and will be extravagantly terrible when he’s 15.
Going to meet Brendan and Kevin was only the first of my son’s litany of reasons for why he felt it necessary to take a midnight sprint through the neighborhood. Reason No. 2 was that, and I’m quoting, “Alpha Pig goes for walks by himself,” which is the exact kind of inscrutable and brilliant 4-year-old argument that leaves you completely and utterly powerless, because your only recourse is staring your son in the eye and saying something deeply meaningful like, “But son, you are not Alpha Pig.”
The following morning, however, we learned it was possible that he heard the Polar Express, which actually makes a lot of sense. We watch “The Polar Express” a lot, we watch like the survival of the family line depends on it, which is funny, because my standard problem with “The Polar Express” is its central message seems to be: If a strange man in a magical locomotive pulls up to your front yard in the middle of the night, you better damn sure go with him and get on that train.
So two nights ago I was sprinting around with a flashlight chasing a 4-year-old who wandered into a cold dark night despite being cripplingly terrified by parts of “The Tigger Movie,” and tonight he’s once again snoring securely in his room (in a cage that’s suspended in midair and guarded by monkeys, which is where he’ll sleep for the next eight years, but in his room). And I can’t muster up any more important lessons from all this than 1. “The Polar Express” is probably responsible for most of what’s wrong with America, and 2. Two people whose names are possibly Brendan and Kevin are close to entirely responsible for my son, right now, being asleep at home.
December 3rd, 2008 at 2:42 pm
[...] Read The Adventure Of The Wandering Pajama-Clad Toddler. [...]
December 3rd, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I would be shitting my pants in fear if my kid did that — and she’s 12!
I’m glad everything worked out and those two guys found him, but … wow, that’s pretty scary stuff, Jeff.
December 3rd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
ACK! Ted told me about this, and I had to come see for myself. I think my first toast from now on, every time you have a glass of wine, should be, “to Brendan and Kevin”. At least until Jake is old enough to really embarrass with that story.
December 4th, 2008 at 6:25 am
[...] and I know, this makes six new blogs, Ted told me about his bloggy buddy, Jeff Vrabel’s post in which his 4-year-old son decided to wander down the street at 1am whilst his parents were [...]
December 4th, 2008 at 10:51 am
I’ve often said that “Polar Express” is responsible for everything that’s wrong with not only America, but the rest of the world as well.
Glad to hear that he was found safe and sound!
December 5th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Looks like I picked an eventful week to check your blog!
All the more reason you guys should move back to Chicago. It’s so cold here he would have pushed the abort button after about 10 seconds and crawled back into bed without a second thought.
December 8th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Wow, Jeff, that story gave me goosebumps. I’m guessing that if you installed a high-up latch lock, Jake would just haul out the step stool, huh?
July 23rd, 2009 at 8:27 am
[...] he straightens up, I stumble across a solution online or DCFS comes by (“Oh, you’re the guy whose kid went running around the neighborhood at 2 a.m., a week before you were ticketed for speeding in a school zone?” they’ll usually say first, [...]
December 3rd, 2011 at 12:37 am
My two-year-old “escaped” out the emergency exit of a McDonald’s play area the other day and that was enough to freak me out – I don’t even want to contemplate this possibility!
December 6th, 2011 at 9:46 am
Yeah, Nathaniel, that would be a problem. At least this was like a familiar environment, you know? Not sure where he would have gone if he was out in public.
December 9th, 2011 at 8:58 pm
[...] the movie because it has a train in it. In fact, he likes it so much that late one night last year, he left the house at 1:30 in the morning and walked off into our darkened neighborhood, telling us later, after the police had found him, it was because he heard “The Polar Express,” [...]
February 2nd, 2012 at 9:20 am
I totally feel your pain! When my now 7 year old was on the brink of his third birthday, he used a lawn chair to get up to the gate lock, unlock it, open the gate, walked two blocks down the street, crossed a busy road around 6 pm at night and was playing with rocks in the parking lot of a record store! thankfully, the store owner’s came out and scooped him up!
And about three weeks ago my now 3 year old went for a hike in the woods with the dog. That necessitated police intervention and search dogs!!!
These kids are out to kill me!!