A Proud Moment

I should’ve called this post “Ears Like Hawk Pt 3.”

Our home becomes like The Red October submarine when Elijah goes down for a nap. We run silent. All TV’s and stereos landline phones are unplugged. All cell phones are destroyed. The dog is banished to the back room so he cannot protect our house from burglars. I’d rather lose everything than have Grover bark and wake up the little man.

Then, only then, can we hope he’ll sleep more than one hour. Thus, making everyone’s lives easier for the rest of the day. Big nap = happy baby. Bad nap = wanting to “go out for cigarettes” for 3-5 years.

Today, Diana and I put Eli to bed at 11a.m. and decided to go sneak into our room to read Steven King books. Which is great because Steven King is even scary in the late morning. It’s also terrible because, as I’ve said before, our bedroom door opens into Eli’s room. So we’re trapped.

For the most part, Di and I had a grand old time. Our skin crawled with the Master’s eerie gross tales. Eli didn’t stir for the first 1 ½ hours. But then, the two cups of coffee and two glasses of Gatorade I drank earlier made their presence known. In my bladder.

I started to squirm and look at our clock. I could expect Eli to sleep another ½ at the least. Wiggling my legs only worked to make Diana wonder what the heck I was doing.

“I gotta make pee pee,” I said like a second grader.

“That sucks,” Diana said, “Because you aren’t opening our door under penalty of death.”

“What am I going to do? Wet the bed?”

Diana said, without a hint of joking, “Pee in one of your hundred water glasses.” I drink water at night out of big mason jars. I also refuse to take them to the dishwasher. Diana calls it my glass menagerie. I looked at three within pee distance. But, I just couldn’t. It’s gross and seemed to cross some line of what separates us from the animals.

I decided to wait it out. Which made me have to pee worse. Every word of my book swam with liquid words like “blood, gush, trickle, flow, squirt.” I kept thinking of my poor kidneys, who were already angry at me from the beers I had with Steve the night before.

I won’t reveal if I peed in the mason jars. But in the future you should think twice about beating me in Guitar Hero and then asking for a glass of water.