Check, Please!

When I wake up in the middle of the night with a dry mouth I generally lie there for a while trying to go back to sleep. Some of the time I succeed and other times I know that the only way to fall back into a peaceful slumber is to get up and quench my dehydrated tongue. We don’t keep a cup in the upstairs bathroom because the water in our town is undrinkable without first being filtered so I drag my stumbling feet out of bed and lumber along the hall and down the stairs into the kitchen.

I don’t generally have a problem weaving my way through the obstacle course made up of toys and baby gear in the dark thanks to the streetlight on our corner. But then, in the almost pitch blackness of four a.m., I open the refrigerator door and blind myself with the bright and glaring light that comes on in order to allow me to see the jugs of milk, the grapefruits and last week’s spaghetti that has been shoved into the back recesses of the bottom shelf.

Once the door to the fridge is swung shut I’m left with that bright spot across my field of vision that renders me completely blind and incapable of returning to my bed in the darkness in which I left it. So I turn on the some lights along the way in order to return to my bedroom in relative safety, without fear for life and limb, and wonder why I didn’t just turn on a light in the first place. I climb under the covers and snuggle down into my still-warm spot on the bed and speculate about how long it will be before I’m awakened again by my body in an urgent plea to relieve myself of the liquid I just put into it.

My husband and I went out to dinner last night for the first time since the baby has been born; she has been left with Nana a few times during the day so that I could go to doctors’ appointments, but she has never been left with anyone during the evening. Of course she decided not to take her late afternoon nap, so by the time seven o’clock rolled around she was starting to get pretty tuckered and cranky.

My poor sister is a trooper. We were gone for a little over two hours and the baby cried hysterically and inconsolably for the second hour that we were gone; my son obviously thought that his auntie didn’t have her hands full enough and he decided it would be a good time to try out some new, previously unused vocabulary. When his auntie told him not to jump off the arm of the couch he spread his arms wide and asked, “why not?” Ugh. I’m sure the next time my husband and I want to go out my sister will be busy shampooing her cat.