Rough afternoon

There's something good in every bad situation, right? Today's good is that I came up with a good attribute of Sabrina (not the only good attribute, she has tons of them): she's tenacious.

It took us an hour to get in the car after school today because Sabrina absolutely 100 percent refused to let me do ANYTHING for her. She wouldn't let me untie the knot in her shoelaces, lift her over a pile of snow, help her after she fell in the snow, or, most relevantly, buckle her seatbelt. She refused to sit back in her seat, and it was raining, so I told her that I was going to sit in the front until she was ready to sit properly in her seat.

I pulled out my knitting and occupied myself as she grumbled a bit, and then decided that she was going to buckle her seatbelt herself. First she tried pulling it while she was sitting, but she discovered that while she can unbuckle her seatbelt while sitting in the seat, she can't reach to buckle it. So she climbed out of the seat and spent 15 minutes trying--and ultimately succeeding--to buckle the seatbelt over the booster seat. She then climbed in (bet you didn't realize that was possible), and all would have been well except that the lap belt (and the shoulder belt, but that was of less immediate concern) was over the arm rest, rather than under it, so the seatbelt wasn't secure enough. I said that I was going to fix it, and in response, she unbuckled the seatbelt and began again. This time I told her that the straps of the seatbelt needed to go under the arm rest. Ten minutes later it was buckled, but she couldn't get herself between the seat and the seatbelt. Then she had a meltdown, at which point I learned an important lesson:

If you have only one child, and that child sits on the same side of the car all the time, do not engage the child locks on both sides of the car. Yes, I got myself stuck in the backseat with Sabrina and no adults to open the car. I climbed into the front, then realized that I could have unrolled the window and opened the door from the outside that way. But better not to have gotten stuck in the first place.

Finally, she tried again and ultimately was able to get the seatbelt buckled and then into the seat secured by the belt. I really didn't think it was possible.

Now, to make sure that doesn't happen again...