Thursday, November 20, 2008

A Victory for Mommy (& Toyota!)

Last week while traveling 40 mph down Ashburn Village Road, AJ opened the car door. That was one way for him to get my attention! That was all it took for me to get in the habit of hitting the lock button when we are all loaded in the car. Less than 48 hours later, AJ learned how to unlock the door. I discovered this after I heard him rattling the knob and I hit the lock button to ensure it was in fact locked. Well, that pinched his finger and he yelled the rest of the way home. I was probably not as sympathetic as he would have liked and we clearly still didn't have a solution.

Aunt Megan reminded me that I should have the child lock feature on my new fangled, well-equipped Toyota. She was right and last night I located it with a flash light and it is now engaged. A victory for Mommy - sort of.

Not one to be easily outsmarted, AJ discovered this morning that Mommy had done something to disable the door lock from the inside. So he moved to the next set of buttons. Again, at 40 mph and 31 degrees out AJ rolled down his window! Yay for Toyota - now I know why I have a driver side button that can lock down all the other window buttons and have put it into use too. So, it took a child door lock and a window lock but I think I have regained control in the car.

What on Earth did people do before the cars had all this extra safety/kid stuff? Back then you also didn't have car seats with 5 point harnesses and super safety built in. That explains something about a lot of people I know - they must have opened the car door at 40 mph, rolled out and hit their head :-)

5 comments:

Hokey said...

maybe you're too young to have lived through the era of optional seat belt use. it was a dangerous world we inhabited.

Sydney said...

back in the day, which was a wednesday, there weren't buttons either so rolling dorwn windows and unlocking doors wasn't so simple. it took more progressed motor skills to turn a crank for the window or pull up the lock. but good to hear AJ is still a smart one!

Gramama said...

Some of us lived in an age where we would get our hands or our butt smacked for opening the car door or the window! That was before the politically correct took over.But what would the shrinks do if we weren't around?

Hokey said...

i'm a fan of that method. it worked on me. and i even learned to prevent future smackings.

Dad said...

Come on now, none of us are surprised that AJ likes to push buttons - are we?

We did have a dog (back in the day, Sydney, and it was a Sunday, just so you know) that jumped out of the window of a moving car. (At least I think it was a dog that jumped and not my eldest daughter.)

Glad to hear it only took you and Toyota together to outsmart the boy. ;-)