The Scariest Day of my life as a Parent

Today we talked about how to prevent children who are autistic from leaving their premises. Lock the doors, put up gates, pay attention and put up alarms on the doors. 

You think that you are doing all the right things and then in seconds you have to re-think everything. There are a lot of nervous minutes that you have as a parent.  Some of these things that occur are things that you never gave a thought to.  For instance, I have two 12 year old pre-teens that chose to walk away, without telling me,  while we were away on vacation at a National park.  The park was  within walking distance of our hotel.  It only took 2 minutes for me to go down to the water's edge for them to decide they had had enough of the park and wanted to go to the hotel. 

It was a frightening 10 minutes.  Once we realized they were gone, we retraced our steps to the hotel.
I stayed inside the gates of the park while my husband made his way back to the hotel.  We had given them an extra key so they could move back and forth around the hotel. 

Sure enough they were in the pool!  We had a long discussion about the risks of walking away from your parents without telling them.  This is the reason that parents have grey hair.