Like I'm 15

A few months ago, we finished our basement.  Well, I say "we," but it was really Michael, his dad, a plumber and a carpenter.  I helped hold the slidey recessed light canister thingies in place, though.  The fact that I'm calling them slidey recessed light canisters shows that it's a good thing I didn't do much more than that.  But you can add 10 bonus points for me getting up on a ladder and looking straight up, because at the ripe old age of 34 I'm officially not a fan of heights. Just lights.  So yeah, we finished the basement. 

The kids like to play down there, we have hosted company a few times down there, but mostly we like to hide down there.  Charlie's on a streak again of screaming himself to sleep.  This week's worst night was 2 hours.  Poor sweet Oliver wanted to give him his favorite small plastic figurine to sleep with.  I told him that it was very sweet, but ScubaMan was too small for him to have in the crib, and he might choke.  "But then he's going to cry again," he said.  "Good point," I said, "throw it in there."  No, I didn't, really.  We settled on a baby monkey, which was not real, and closed the door on his wailing, which was very real.

I've expressed to Michael that when we hide out in the basement, I'm afraid that Oliver will need something, go downstairs to the living room and not find us there, not find us upstairs in the bedroom, and then think we've completely left the house.  Which we've only done on a handful of occasions, when our babysitter was unavailable for date night, and the time when I ran out of Lindor truffles at 11 pm.  Oh, come on now, I'm kidding.  I would never run out of Lindor truffles. 

The fear continued to plague me and I relented to just using earbuds in my laptop in the living room to drown out Charlie's protests.  I would text Michael my frustration over Charlie's behavior, which was always answered: "BASEMENT, BABY!"  I actually thought of grabbing a post-it and writing Oliver a note to let him know I was down there, until I remembered that oh yeah, he's four.  So I finally just explained to Ollie that if he needed something, and Mommy and Daddy weren't in their room, and if they weren't in the living room or kitchen, that we might be down in the basement.  "Okay," he said simply, and repeated what I told him.

My hideout "me time" includes incredibly grown-up things, such as reading, catching up on world events, cleaning the house, organizing closets, and making freezer-friendly meals for the week.  At the end of the day, I refuse to pick up one more piece of food chunk off the floor, wash one more dish, prepare one more meal, or return one more rogue plastic toy before it impales the arch of my foot for the third time.  I'm off duty, man.  Pajamas go on and Netflix starts streaming the 78th episode of Gossip Girl.  This of course implies that I have watched 77 other episodes of this trashy, trashy show.  A show with absolutely no substance or merit, a show that adds nothing to my brain.  But that's exactly the point.  Watching a teenage soap opera about the dramas of high-society Upper East Side New York is about as far from getting poop stains out of a rug as it can get.  One may argue that Chuck Bass's new dog may have christened his million dollar Persian carpet but that would make for a very boring story line; I prefer that he continue to lose himself in his booze and the hotel that he owns at age 19.  And will he ever end up with Blair Waldorf for good?  I can't believe she's pregnant with the Prince of Monaco's baby and not Chuck's. 

Tonight as I was tucking Oliver into bed, he recited the basement plan to me again.  "If I just need to go to the bathroom, I just go.  But if I need something, I look in Mommy and Daddy's room.  If they're not there,  I look downstairs.  If they're not there, I look in the basement, sometimes they're there."

"That's right!" I say.

"Sometimes you play down there," he says gravely.

All I can do is laugh and nod, as he adds:

"Like you're 15."


Busted.