Our bestest friend (and cousin) Nancy let us stay at her house last night while the floors were getting redone.
She called me on the cell this morning, after Eric and the girls and I had finished running around her house like crazed piglets, dropping bits of muffin everywhere and bonking our heads and farting and squealing, finally getting out of there and off to school or work.
"Are you glad we're gone?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, no hesitation.
"Aren't you glad we don't have to stay with you tonight?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Me, too."
Not that we're not all a bundle of laughs. And, in fact, Nolie and Addie slept through the night just fine. We started Addie out in a sleeping bag on the floor of Nancy's room, the plan being that we'd let her go to sleep first, then Eric and I would sneak in and sleep in Nancy's bed. Nolie would be in her pack n' play in the office, and Nancy would sleep on the couch with her cats Rico and Paco.
Of course, what actually happened was that Addie ended up in the bed with Eric. I tried sleeping in the sleeping bag on the hardwood floor, but wimped out and bogarted the couch while Nancy was yakking away on the phone downstairs. She ended up sleeping in the freezing cold basement (it is WICKED, wicked cold here). Nolie, toasty warm with the house's lone space heater, stayed cozy and asleep all night long.
So, tally: Eric, Addie, and Nolie slept fine (Eric woke up this morning saying, "Hey! I slept fine!" Good for him. Good for him). Nancy and I grunted at each other as we passed in the kitchen, me pausing only to dig the dagger out of my back, the one that shot out of her eyes as punishment for stealing the couch. We didn't even bother to ask how the other had slept. We knew.
Later, after the caffeine had set in and we were safely out of the house, we could joke about the situation. I told her to pray that someone would break into the u-haul in front of our house and steal all of our furniture so that we could get new stuff. She said she'd be happy to take our old furniture. "But then Eric would know you have it," I said. "Or else we wouldn't be able to come over anymore."
"Exactly," she said, snickering. "Exactly."
The point is, it's tough to be in someone else's space when you've got kids. Even if they have kids, and a huge mansion with an entire wing for you and your entourage and your ridiculous amount of baby gear, it's tough. Because you're missing most of your infrastructure, and what little infrastructure you can bring with you will always impose on someone else's space. We love Nancy, and she loves us, but we'll be glad to get back to our own beds tonight, with our white noise machines, humidifiers, baby monitors, mobiles, stuffed animals, pillows, toilets, and tissues exactly where we need them to be. And Nancy will be glad to be warm and cozy in her bed, too.
But the stuff in the u-haul is up for grabs, in case you're in our neighborhood. :)
