Earlier this week we were burgled. I’m not going to go into too much detail because you know, all sorts of people read stuff on the internet and specifics in this circumstance are not really helpful for information in the public domain.
It was a professional job, certainly as far as the police were concerned. A door was forced, several points of exit were sorted and then the house was completely ransacked. Stuff was taken, although it will take us a long time to completely work out what’s gone because with three little kids in the house, it’s not that tidy in the normal course of events and the mess they left it in was like nothing I’ve seen outside of a disaster movie. I have to say though, I was pleased when the scene of crime officer said it was a typical family house; messy but not dirty. That bizarrely made me feel a lot better, although it was a little embarrassing when he asked if the pile of books strewn on the floor was the work of the burglars- it wasn’t, it was the two year old. In fact there was a fairly high chance that stuff fell out of cupboards when they opened them, there was a skateboard in one doorway and some diecast metal cars littering the sitting room floor. The chances for a Home Alone style accident must have been pretty high.
We were so lucky in a sense when it came to finding out we’d been broken in to. I met wifey and the kids round our friends where they’d gone for an impromptu dinner playdate and then drove everyone home afterwards. We managed to get the kids back into the car before they saw much more than the mess in the hallway. We’re also really lucky to have a policeman a couple of doors down who happened to be in too. After calling the police and reporting the break in, I took the kids back to our friends house, where they were made to feel safe and comfy. The boys initial panic abated when I informed him his soft toy bunnies were safe and his Minecraft game hadn’t been pinched. Ned is too little to really know what’s happened, so out of the kids, it’s Fifi who’s been wide eyed and upset by it all. Heck, the boy has been going around asking questions about detective procedures, asking to have his finger prints taken and trying to work out how to track the nasty men down.
For us, the first priority has been to make things as safe and comfortable for the children. We’ve not really had time to react ourselves just yet and when it sinks in properly, who knows? It might be difficult. Oddly, neither of us has that feeling of being violated that a lot of burglary victims do. Perhaps it’s because they did it in a professional manner, it felt like it was nothing personal to a degree, even if they had to pick there way over all the kids toys, look at pictures of our family and know that they were ruining a families life in some fashion.
Obviously the stuff they took was insured but you can’t replace sentimental items and there is still the disruption and the insurance excesses to deal with. It’s been a sobering and sad experience but at the end of it, I realised that the people in the car with me as I drove back to our burgled home are the truly important things to me.
Oh, and I had my smartphone with me, which obviously made the whole thing much more bearable…