Never mix handcuffs and Christmas

In all the flurry of getting back into blogging after Christmas I realized yesterday that I teased you with the handcuffed cousin story but never actually told you. Without further ado…

As you know, I had a bazillion 16 people stay at my house for a four day period during Christmas. Everyone started arriving on Friday, including my cousin and her family. Her and her boyfriend needed to run to Wal-Mart shortly after arriving (Wal-Mart is about a 20 minute trip) and my husband had to run to Lowe’s again (the fridge didn’t come with the water filter it was supposed to come with) (of course it didn’t) and it’s right across from Wal-Mart. Basically, all the adults decided to go to Wal-Mart or Lowe’s, leaving me with my cousin’s children (which I know are technically my “cousins once removed” or some crap like that but for the sake of my fingers efficiency let’s just call them “my cousins” ok?)

These cousins are 13 and 11 (plenty old enough that I wasn’t actually babysitting) and they were able to keep themselves busy playing with my kids in the toy room. Everything was going beautifully…until my cousin K came out with his hands in handcuffs. Great.

We have these handcuffs from my Aunt. She sent them in a box of toys she had left over from her boys (her boys are in college now) and the keys were included. (I know they included the keys because at one point my husband got locked in them and it was a mad scramble to try to find them. So we definitely had the keys.)

So commence the hysterical laughing search for the keys. You may remember that I mentioned we cleaned out the toy room just before Christmas. I didn’t recall coming across the keys when we cleaned but I knew we had them so we started looking. K was trying to help but his hand functionality was...somewhat limited. After a few minutes of sifting through the junk toys and not having any success I commented, “Well, at least you learned your lesson. Don’t put your hands in handcuffs unless you know where the keys are BEFORE you do it.” We laughed. About 30 seconds later I hear him say “Uh oh!” I turned to look and now he has his fingers caught in one of those Chinese finger traps! He now has his hands cuffed AND his fingers cuffed! I really wish I had taken the time to take a picture. However, I took pity on him because he kept saying the cuffs were really tight and starting to hurt. (Next time, I’ll  remember it’s worth the extra seconds to get photographic evidence. Promise.)

Thankfully he was able to get his fingers out but we still had the little problem of his hands. We were coming up empty looking for the keys and we were running out of places to look. I called my husband to laugh about the situation to see if he knew where the keys were, but he didn’t. I tried calling my mom to see if she remembered coming across them when we cleaned out the closet, but she didn’t. Remember how I mentioned Wal-Mart and Lowe’s were about 20 minutes away? He got stuck in the cuffs while everyone was still on their way there. It was going to be awhile before anyone got back. I’m not completely useless but breaking into handcuffs exceeds my abilities. We were just going to have to wait.

After about an hour my husband got home and my cousin basically bull-rushed him at the door. My husband took him out to his tool bench and got to work. He was trying everything to get into them and was just about to break out the hack-saw when he finally got them open with an allen wrench!

When they came back in he was finally handcuff free but he had huge welts around his wrists. The marks lasted for several hours! (Again, totally upset that I didn’t get pictures.)

So hopefully he has learned his lesson I’m not optimistic and doesn’t put handcuffs on himself every again! And, as my husband said, maybe he’ll think twice about breaking the law.

Oh, and yes, we threw out the handcuffs.

Lily