Getting Locked Out

So, Friday night Jonny and I went to my sister Melissa and niece Alyssa's play, A Miracle on 34th Street, at the Sugar Factory Playhouse. It was actually very entertaining and we both enjoyed it very much. It was great seeing my niece and sister act on stage, because it was something neither of them had ever done before. Well, the play got out much later than we had anticipated, and our poor puppy Koda had been in her kennel all night. So when we got home we decided we needed to walk her. It was around 11 PM when we left the house to take our daily walk with Koda, on the path behind our house. Before leaving however, we locked all the doors and exited through the garage, thinking that we'd be able to come back through that way, by putting in the garage code. After a half hour walk, we came home, but to our dismay the garage code would not work. We'd type in our password and the darn thing just kept blinking, but certainly not lifting the garage like it is supposed to. We kept trying it over and over with no luck. We reached in our pockets to pull out our keys, but quickly realized that we foolishly had left them inside the house before leaving. Next, we looked at my car. If the doors were unlocked we could simply hit the garage button and it would open and we'd get in. Any other day of the week my car would have been left unlocked, simply because I'm too lazy to lock it. But NO, not today. It was locked, so we really had no way to get into our house without climbing through a window somewhere.
Well, we walked around to every window on the ground floor trying to remove screens and pushing on the windows, but that was not working because they were all locked. I said a prayer in my heart that Heavenly Father would help us get in to our house. By this time it began to snow profusely, and it was already in subfreezing temperatures, so Koda was starting to get a little antsy and cold. I took her out back to go potty and noticed my back door neighbor out with his dog. I told him our situation and he nicely came over to offer assistance. He looked at the garage code device and asked if the batteries were too low to open the garage. We thought it was a possibility, but never opened it up to check. DUH. My neighbor was trying his darnedest to think of ideas to help. Jonny called a locksmith to see how much it would cost to come and break in our house. It was going to cost $150 bucks. "There goes a huge chunk of Christmas money" Jonny said. We didn't give up. As it got colder our neighbor insisted we come over and get warm, and even sleep over and worry about it in the morning. Jonny wanted to keep trying, so he called his dad, who was asleep, to come help. By then it was half past midnight and we were all standing around wondering how the crap we were gonna get in. Jonny's dad eventually pulled up as the snow started coming down thicker. He brought with him a wire hanger completely bent out of shape to try to break into my car. He tried every which way to jab that thing in, in hopes to hit the unlock button, but that was not working. Finally, his dad went over to the garage code and undid the battery cover and suggested we go to Walmart to buy another to see if that was the problem.
We loaded up in his van, Jonny, Mark, Koda and I and we drove slipping and sliding all the way to the store. We bought a new battery and drove back.
When we got back home we switched out the batteries, typed in the garage password and BOOM... it opened, finally. It was just before 2 AM when we got in. Any longer and we would have had to break a window or something. Inside we made hot herbal tea to warm up, and cranked up the heater to a million degrees and sat around laughing about how dumb we were to leave without taking keys with us. Ya, we learned a lot that night.