I.P. Freely

The last time I was in the hospital was when my son, Clyde, was six months old and my daughter, Clementine, was five (they’re now four and nine); and even though several years have passed since then, I still lovingly refer to those two days in the hospital as “my time in the spa.” Really, it was lovely: people brought me trays of food (ok, my first dinner consisted of pureed gristle, but at least it was gristle that had been pureed by someone else); I had complete control over the remote (although the nurses did make me turn off the TV after the seventh episode of Law & Order one night); and, even though it was January, for once I could be nice and warm without worrying about the gas bill (of course, with a temperature of 104, I had been plenty warm at home as well). But by far, the thing that elevated my hospital stay into a pampered spa-like experience was the fact that for the first time in nearly five years I got to sleep in a bed all by myself.

I know what you’re saying: what difference does it make if you get a hospital bed to yourself when the nurses are coming in and waking you up every hour? And, while I suppose that is true, I do have to say that the difference is this: to the best of my knowledge, not once did a nurse ever wake me up by climbing into bed with me and peeing on my leg. (Although, as I said before, I had a pretty high fever, so who knows if my recollection of events is completely accurate. Still, given the professionalism exhibited by the nursing staff under all other circumstances, I’m willing to go out on a limb and reiterate my previous contention: at no time during my hospital stay did someone come into the room and pee on me.)

This cannot be said of my bedroom at home.

At one time, my goal was to have Clyde out of our bedroom and into his own bed by the time he was three; after that deadline passed,(with no appreciable movement towards success) my goals were correspondingly revised downward: first to having him spend the majority of the night in his own bed, then to having him spend a few hours there, finally to having him just agree to touch his head to his own pillow briefly sometime during the early evening. In the end, however, my goal was reduced to one little point: even though as far as I am concerned Clyde can now sleep in any bed he likes, for as long as he likes, I would appreciate it if he would at least agree to get up and go pee in his own bed.

Amazingly, at this point in our relationship that’s all I ask anymore; I’ve resigned myself to every other aspect of “co-sleeping” (more commonly referred to as “no-sleeping”): waking up clinging to the edge of the futon like an opossum to its mother; never having a blanket cover anything above my waist (so as not to smother the shorter members of the bed guild); even having my buttocks occasionally used as hand warmers–everything, in fact, except the nightly golden showers and their accompanying forlorn little cries of “I peed!”

I know: even though he’s now four we could still put Clyde into some sort of a pull-up, but having done my “happy to be free of the diapers dance” nearly a year ago when he potty-trained, I find the thought of this extra expense rather daunting. After all, crossing diapers off of our monthly budget meant we could finally start buying good beer again, which in many ways helped alleviate the whole “sleeping through the night” problem for us all. After all, no one could be expected to make it through the night with a bladder full of Old Milwaukee.

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