Sasha, Doughnuts, and a Toilet

One of these days I’ll finally get it through my thick skull that, no matter what time I go to bed, no matter what day it is, Baby Sasha will wake up about 6:30 AM and demand attention. This morning at 6:48, a full five hours and 48 minutes after I fell sleep, my wife Evi shook me from her side of the bed and said, “Joe, wake up. Sasha needs her diaper changed.”

Barely conscious, I could hear my daughter yelling in the other room. I mumbled incoherently.

“I just fed her,” Evi said as she pulled the blankets back over her body. “Go.”

Perhaps here you’re asking yourself–I certainly did–since Evi was awake anyway, why the bloody hell couldn’t she change Sasha’s goddamn diaper after feeding her, thus giving her hardworking husband a little more sleep on a Saturday morning? 

I’ve learned not to ask questions like that anymore. The answer is never satisfying, and more than half the time not verbal. I stumbled over into Sasha’s room and proceeded to change her diaper, the contents of which could’ve made a good prop for a slasher movie. I then set her down on the floor to play with her toys, and crawled into a little day bed we have to sneak in a little more sleep. I closed my eyes.

“What are your plans today?” Evi asked seemingly seven seconds later. She was awake, fully dressed, and standing over me, so perhaps it was longer.

“Nothing,” I mumbled. 

“Well, you can fix the hall toilet. The back patio needs to be cleaned as well. And we should probably go shopping.”

I paused for a second. Evi apparently thought of my answer as a request, rather than my actual itinerary.

“No, I meant, my plan is to do nothing.”

“That’s funny,” she said. Not in the ‘haha’ funny kind of way, nor in the ‘ironic’ funny kind of way. More like in the “you have a seven-month-old daughter and lots of responsibilities so wake the fuck up” funny kind of way.

Truth is, I did have a lot to do. The original plan was to go network with real estate professionals. I’m a mortgage broker by trade, and Saturdays are a good day to visit open houses and real estate offices to offer my services. Unfortunately, Friday night our hallway bathroom’s toilet decided to take a shit of its own, and spewed a leak. At that point I knew I’d be spending a good part of my Saturday split between Home Depot and underneath a crapper.

My father decided to go with me on the toilet parts run, and the first place we stopped was Dunkin’ Donuts, because Dunkin’ Donuts. Since Evi had been craving doughnuts for a few days, I bought her a half dozen, then stopped back at home to drop them off before Dad and I continued to Home Depot. About 30 minutes later, while in the plumbing section, I received an iMessage from my wife that says “Never trust a quiet baby.” Attached was the following picture:

Evi told me later than she doesn’t actually remember leaving the doughnuts on the floor. All she knows was that she got distracted, had to leave the room for a moment, then came back to find our sweet Baby Sasha, who’s never eaten solid food in her life, not only ingesting doughnut, not only wearing doughnut, but actually sitting on doughnut. Oh, and I mustn’t forget that she finished it off by spilling coffee all over herself. It was a huge mess. Evi had to bathe our daughter, change her clothes, and wash the carpet. 

Anyway, I had to spend some time today fixing a toilet. Guess I got off easy.