The Den Of Luca

When Di got knocked up with Luca, she decided to convert our dining room into a baby lounge. It was a place where she could chill out with the new baby without having to run upstairs every time he filled is diaper.

The Luca room has a nice daybed, a big, white changing table and loads of knickknacks only someone who watches hours and hours of HGTV could love. It has a nice, zen-like quality that I’m going to say helped make boy #2 the mellow guy he is today.

Well, over the course of the last 2 months, I’ve slowly but surely invaded the Luca Den. Diana decided she doesn't want to sleep there anymore. When the eventual zombie attack occurs, she doesn’t want to be on ground level. She’ll be able to fight them off with her unread copy of “Eat. Pray. Love.”

About halfway through every night when Luca does his wake up, I’ll stumble downstairs to finish my night’s sleep. I’ve also taken to sleeping there all night on the weekends when I do the overnight shift so DI can have uninterrupted sleep.

Consequently, a distinct boy stink has invaded her paradise. No, you can’t make me shower on the weekends. You just can’t. And when it’s just Luca and me all night, I don’t feel bad about my male gaseous emissions. What’s Luca going to do about it? Write a letter to the editor of Hamanneggs? It also doesn’t help that I have a bad habit of flinging my dirty socks into the corner by the radiator. It smells like roasted Fritos.

To top it off, Grover uses the daybed for his 23 naps per day. And, well, he stinks. Like a dog who enjoys the unseasonably warm weather we’re having.

Despite my unconscious desire to destroy the Luca Den, we decided to buy a new rocking chair for the room. We felt it was cruel to take Eli’s chair since he loves the danger of pinching his fingers on it. But I need a chair when I feed Luca in the middle of the night. I can’t feed him on the bed. It’s too tempting to fall asleep and use him as a pillow.

So we looked on Craigslist and found a good one for $50. Before I left to go pick it up, Di warned me, “Give it a good once over. I don’t want any poopy chair.”

I arrived at the downtown apartment of the chair sellers and, like everyone who picks up a Craigslist item from a stranger, wondered if I was about to be murdered. The couple was nice and had a young girl and another baby on the way.

I asked them why they were selling the chair. “Oh, uh, you know. Downsizing and stuff.”

I looked at the chair and saw it was poop free. Given my complete lack of small talk ability, I gave them $50 and high tailed it out of there.

Di seemed happy with the purchase and we set it up in the room. Later that night, I got to try it out on the overnight shift.

The minute I sat down, the chair groaned like the structural integrity of an office building was failing. In fact, the slightest move in the chair sounded like a Brontosaurus getting a glass enema.

Despite what you’d think, infants don’t like loud, grinding noises when they’re trying to eat at 4 in the morning.

Thankfully, I tightened all the understuff on the chair and the Brontosaurus enema noise has mostly gone away. But occasionally in the middle of the night I’ll be rocking with the boy and be reminded why Craigslist is awesome.