Ninja maneuvers

James loves elevators and is always sorry to have to get out of them. He took this preference to its extreme yesterday afternoon when I was picking him up from school.

We were just getting off the elevator at the ground floor when he decided he hadn't had enough fun yet and executed a nifty little ninja maneuver in which he dove back into the elevator just as the doors were closing.

Utter horror.

I executed a nifty little ninja maneuver of my own and stuck my foot into the elevator door to block its closing, then kicked it hard to force it open again.

The last thing I needed right then was for James to be rampaging solo through the Office of Thrift Supervision, especially since he's short enough that the only elevator buttons he can reach are the ones for the parking garage floors. So he'd either be trapped in the elevator, or wandering around the garage during the peak evening traffic period.

Neither of these options seemed ideal.

Anyway, my forced re-opening caused the elevator alarm to go crazy. As I reached in to grab James, he flung himself over to the far wall of the elevator and seized the handrail to keep me from picking him up. When I did so anyway, he first went limp (in what we have been tending to refer to as the Boned Chicken Maneuver), then stuck his arms straight over his head and went rigid (the Baguette Maneuver). I tossed him over my shoulder in the fireman's lift and headed for the lobby. He was even more mad at me than I was at him.

He kept shouting at me all the way through the lobby, past the security desk, out the building, across the street and around the block to the parking garage, into the car, and most of the way up Connecticut Avenue. I caught "Bad! Bad! Bad!" a few times, but most of it was just furious yelling. It was quite a performance.