Baby’s First Home Invasion

At 1am, I heard the side door bang shut loudly. A little odd given the hour, but Diana roams around a lot at night with wine store related anxiety, so I chalked it up to nothing and closed my eyes.

I heard another thud from the other side of the house. The side of our house that’s currently undergoing a massive renovation. What in the world would Diana be doing over there?

I leaned over and saw Diana was sound asleep. Uh-oh.

I crept over the two, count ‘em, two sleeping guard dogs in our hallway: Grover and Chris and Lexa’s massive German Shepherd Greta. I’ll get back to them being fired later.

I tiptoed through our dining room and peeled back the plastic sheeting separating us from the construction. Then I saw it: A box being hauled out of our front living room by some dude. It appears the construction workers had left the window unlocked and someone was using it as their own personal Best Buy.

As a Dad, this is a situation you play out in your head millions of times. Billions. The number one dad job is to protect your family. That’s it. My greatest fear was someone would come into my home and I would be too scared to protect Diana, Elijah and Luca. I’d choose flight over fight and that would be it. The greatest failure of Dad-ness in the history of the world.

Maybe it was this fear of failure that propelled me across our living room. Or maybe it was the fact that we had just finished watching the revenge movie “John Wick” and I was still amped up from watching Keanu Reeves kill so many people we lost count in the first fifteen minutes.

Either way I ran across the room, stuck my head out the window and shouted, “What the f*ck are you doing?” Loud.

Standing there, with arms full of my stuff, was a bald man who was my age. He was dressed like he was heading off to his own construction site. I don’t think he expected us to be home, because I scared the crap out of him.

He blurted, “I’m here doing work!”

The total illogic of his statement was like a slap to the face. I shook my head and shouted again, “Get the f*ck out of here or I’ll get my gun and f*cking kill you!”

I was glad he didn’t ask to see my gun because I don’t have one. I was also glad he didn’t ask why I didn’t simply bring my fictional gun and murder him John Wick style since it seemed to currently be an option on the table.

The scared bald man burst through our gate and into the night.

I did it! I did it! I scared off a bad man who meant to do my family harm. I brushed off my hands and put my thumbs through my imaginary suspender straps. I also twirled my imaginary gun and put it back into my imaginary holster.

I did a quick search of the premises, this time armed with a lovely Japanese butcher knife Diana had gotten me for Christmas. I also closed up the window and locked it. Case closed.

I went back to bed, so pleased with myself and stared up at the ceiling. I am a modern day hero, I thought. Diana sat up in bed and asked if I had heard a noise.

“I think that was the dogs,” I said. “Oh. And by the way, there was a man in our house but I scared him off.”

“WHAT?” Diana responded in the only reasonable way possible.

“Don’t worry. I scared him off.”

“Did you call the police???” She understandably shouted.

Oh right. The police. They would want to know. Maybe it was adrenaline clouding my thoughts. Or maybe I was a complete moron. But it simply didn’t occur to me to call them.

I called Evanston police and said, “Hi. There was a man who was robbing our house just now.”

They asked if he was still there and I said no, he had been gone for around 15 minutes.

“Sir, why did you wait fifteen minutes to call us?”

I quickly made up a lie that I was busy securing our house and checking to make sure there wasn’t anyone else still there and not spending that time in bed.

Within minutes our house was surrounded by Evanston’s finest. At which point Grover and Greta began barking at the intruders. They are fired.

They didn’t end up catching the guy because, well, he had a lot of time to run away. But the police assured us he wouldn’t be back. Especially with the fictional gun we had in the house.

Long story short, the only stuff the bad guy got was a box of DVDs we set aside for the poor. I hope he likes that scratched copy of The Borne Supremacy.

I also just spent a couple hundred dollars on a home security system advertised (naturally) on NPR.