Pigpen

The other night, our great Illinoisian friend Kitty came to town. Diana immediately ran screaming from the house to join her in delicious Denver sushi. Yes, there is such a thing.

That left me with Boy #1 and Boy #2 and an hour until bedtime. I still had that terrible cold/altitude sickness/Dropsy, so I decided to kill the time by dumping everyone, me included, into the tub.

We played, we splashed, we peed. We peed some more.

I eventually got tired of constantly being urinated on and hopped out. I toweled off and then decided to pee in a crazy new place: the toilet. About halfway through my business, Luca pushed the button on our fancy Jacuzzi tub. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the water level in our tub didn’t cover the Jacuzzi jets. So instead of a delightful massaging of tired baby muscles, there was a terrible hiss plus a violent spit of air and old bacteria all over the boys.

Luca freaked out. He jumped up and down and screamed, “UPPIE UPPIE UPPPE!” Elijah, clamped his hands over his ears and screamed, “Too loud, Luca!”

There was nothing I could do. I stood there attempting to finish peeing, which seemed to go on forever. I tried to calm Luca from two feet away, “It’s ok! It’s ok! The jets can’t hurt you! Okay, the bacteria probably isn’t that great for you and you could get sick down the road, but hold on!”

After what seemed like the longest pee in history, I scooped up Luca and held him. He did that hiccup crying for a quite a while.

The next night, Diana had caught my Dropsy and I was left with bath duty again. I poured a nice cup of bath and dumped Elijah in. I then stripped Luca and tried to get him into the water. An inch from the surface, he freaked out. He was like a cartoon cat. He leaped out of the water and crawled up my head.

I could not, for the life of me, get him into the bath. I then began to worry that I had really broken him. That he’d never take a bath again for as long as he lived. He’d be like the Peanuts character “Pigpen,” but smell like a taxicab.

But then I threw him in the bath like a cat.