A working mom has shared footage of the heartstopping moment her toddler opened their front door in the middle of the night and disappeared into the darkness.
Alisa Green, an ICU nurse and mother of three based in Columbus, Ohio, posted the footage of her then-18-month-old son Maverick’s daring escape to her Instagram, greengray5.
Bedtime has traditionally been a time of some stress for new parents.
A previous study published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, for example, found 42 percent of parents of young children faced some kind of “bedtime resistance” from their little ones.
Green’s experience on this particular night took that concept to a whole other level. It came at the end of a challenging few days for Green and her firefighter husband Nate.
“Maverick had recently figured out how to crawl out of his crib,” Green told Newsweek. “We had tried to turn it into a toddler bed but he hated it. So after 3 sleepless nights we put the crib back together.”
Aware that he would likely try and climb out again, Green had put a few additional security measures in place.
“I put a gymnastics mat on the floor by the bed, just in case, and installed a latch lock on the outside of his bedroom door so that if he did get out of bed in the middle of the night, he wouldn’t be able to get into anything that could hurt him,” she said.
With all three of her kids fast asleep and her husband at the firehouse, Green settled in for a much-needed night of rest herself. It would prove short-lived.
At around 4a.m., Nate, who was still up working the nightshift, received a notification from their Ring doorbell camera letting him know “someone is at your front door.”
Curious to see who could be outside at such an hour, he opened the app only to be greeted by the sight of Maverick running out the front door of their house. “He had apparently climbed out of his crib, jiggled the bedroom door to unlatch the lock, and unlocked the deadbolt on the front door,” Green said.
Nate swung into action, setting off emergency alarms on all three of the Ring cameras in the family home and calling Green on her phone. Fortunately, for everyone involved. Maverick’s venture outside had been short-lived. “He was only outside a matter of 15 seconds before he realized it was cold and dark and he was alone and came running back inside,” Green said.
By that time, Green had been woken by the blaring alarms and her phone ringing and came downstairs to find a “panicked screaming toddler running through the living room and the front door hanging wide open.”
After calming Maverick down, she was able to ask him why he had gone outside at “dark time.” “He said he was going to see his friends in the car,” Green said. “Still no clue if the friends were a dream, imaginary or real but thankful the cameras didn’t pick up any unfamiliar cars in the driveway.”
In the wake of the incident, the Greens decided to beef up their home security, adding slide locks to the tops of all the exterior doors in their homes and window stoppers. They also made it so the handle on his door could be locked from the inside.
Maverick earned the nickname “Danger Baby” for his efforts. Green said she decided to post the doorbell camera footage online because she feels they can “look back on those videos now and laugh.”
Maverick too, seems to have realized the error of his ways telling Green “oh mommy that was naughty” the last time they watched the video back together. There really is never a dull moment.