It ranks right up there, almost every parent’s worst nightmare – what to do if you are separated from your toddler? It could happen anywhere. But what happens when there is two inches of wood between you and your child?
That’s what happened to Karen Kilgour. She screamed for help when toddler Harry shut her in the wardrobe, but nobody could hear her.
You see, Harry has a fascination with things that open and shut.
“The next thing I knew he just pushed the door, and I went, ‘uh oh, I can’t get out of here’,” says his mother Karen.
There was no door handle on the inside, it was 9:30am, and she was trapped – her baby roaming the house alone.
“I started screaming for help as loud as I possibly could, hoping that a neighbour might here me,” she says.
“Of course, every time I screamed for help, Harry would become even more distressed.”
Karen tried everything to force the door open.
“He knew something was wrong, I think he knew straight away because he couldn’t see me. He started crying and then went into the rest of the house to try and find me, screaming and crying – I could hear him banging into things.”
From inside the wardrobe she tried to keep him calm.
“I yelled out to him for a long time. To hold his interest I decided to start singing his favourite song, I must have sung ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ 300 times,” she says.
Between them just a few centimetres of wood, Karen was in sheer terror of what Harry might be doing alone.
By early afternoon, things were getting worse. Karen was supposed to pick up her daughter from day care at 3pm, and her husband wasn’t due home till late that night.
But not one had even noticed she was missing.
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