Smarter than a three year old...car

A couple nights ago the three boys were in bed at a decent if not great hour, and my husband and I relaxed for a whole hour after cleaning up. Standing by the door, I was watching the snow swirling and blowing outside.

All of the sudden BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Now, whose stupid car alarm was that!? I thought as I looked out. Oh. Mine. Whoops. No one was around, and the keys to the car were laying on a shelf between myself and Mike. I shut off the alarm, hitting the unlock button, and while we agreed neither of us had bumped the keys we didn't know what caused it to go off. Giving up, we went off to bed.

I was just closing my eyes when Sam barfed in his crib. Not sure why. As Mike picked him up he barfed again, this time on Mike. New crib sheets, new blankets, new animals. Mike carried him back to bed, but didn't quite make it before he was barfed on again. Baby washed and dried, shower for Mike. Back to bed.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! We both bolted up at the same time. My car was making noise again, and it had woken us from a very deep sleep. Mike went downstairs, looked around. I looked out the window. Absolutely no one in sight. Lots of snow. (That snow better be gone by morning or it will have some explaining to do! I thought.) Mike took the keys, hit the unlock button again, and the car stops. He took the keys upstairs and laid them on the nightstand. Back to sleep.

GARBLED BLOOK! BLARK! We wake up to the cat, probably looking at the keys, sitting on top of the alarm clock and turning on the radio. Choice words for Biscuit the Cat. Radio off, back to sleep.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Arghhhh!!! We are both awake now again, Mike has hit the unlock button again but clearly we can't let this go on every hour or so. Mike goes downstairs to find tools. I follow him to pull the socket set out of the closet. Mike tromps outside and disconnects the battery to the car. No juice, no beep, he told me. Back to sleep.

"Mommy, I pooped!" Next to my side of the bed is a three year old who obviously needed a new diaper (which we still wear at night- thank goodness.) Much crying as it's sore, Mike gets up to look for and fetch the last tube of diaper cream in the house. Back to sleep.

And then, everyone wakes up. Apparently it's morning, but I wasn't buying it. We are tired. Our kids were allowed to be stinkerdoodles at night (it's in their contract), but our car was not. We were both slightly worried that our car's electrical system had serious problems, but after googling the problem and driving it (the back tailgate indicator flashed on intermittently) we found the problem:

• Wet snow melting on the car seeped into our back gate, which was not quite closed.
  
• The car assumed someone was trying to open the back gate, so it sounded the alarm.
  
• We would hit the unlock button which would unlock the car and disarm the alarm.
• What we didn't know: The car would re-lock itself after 30 seconds. It would assume since you didn't manually open the door after hitting unlock, it must have been by accident and it re-locks for you. This of course re-arms the alarm.
• Since the alarm was active again, in an hour or so the snow melting would tell the car someone was trying to open the back gate again.

In summary, we were outsmarted. By our car.