The Great Escape

OB is an escaper.  Whenever there is an open door, a clear exit or a loose safety gate, you can be sure he'll notice and head towards it at surprising speed.

And he's tenacious with it!  Usually he can easily be distracted.  I've lost count of the number of times he's come running across the room with his arms outstretched for a cuddle and then at the last minute noticed a toy and veered off to investigate.  But that never seems to happen when he's on an escape mission.

Today we ventured to the song and rhyme session at the library for the first time in weeks.  It's always a bit of a challenge keeping OB in the room at this session.  The area of the library they use is not enclosed, but instead they place little child-height barriers across the opening.  Unfortunately, OB can easily move these out of the way, and once he's through, the automatically-opening doors to the outside world are just a few steps away!

This is part of the reason I haven't been for a while.  The play part of the session is significantly less fun for me when I spend most of it standing by the barriers like an angry guard dog, or chasing OB all over the library, so when other things have come up on Friday mornings I haven't been too disappointed to miss the library.

But there we were this morning with nothing else in the diary, nice weather for ducks and two restless little ones and I decided that we'd go back to the library.  After all, we did have three library books that are about two months overdue!  I reasoned that OB might have forgotten about the easy exit by now, or might have grown out of his need to escape.

Not so much.

With 15 minutes of arriving I looked up from NB's salt dough masterpiece to realise that I couldn't make visual contact with OB at all.  Scanned the room.  Nothing.  Ran out past the barriers and scanned the rest of the library.  Nothing.

Then I heard a voice from behind the library desk say, "Hey, there's a child out there on the street!"

Sure enough, there was OB merrily making his way down the ramp outside the front of the library on a mission for the road!

Horrifying!

Anyway, he was rescued without incident, although I did wonder whether some of the many library assistants hanging around behind the desk might have helped me out a bit by raising the alarm earlier, or perhaps shifting their behinds off the comfy desk chairs to stop him before he got through the two sets of double doors!

So, it's decided.  We won't be going to the library session again until either OB is a lot older and has grown out of his great escape obsession or they've got something a bit more secure to keep the kids in their places - like chains and maybe a cage!