Confused in the dark. Again.

Here's an excerpt from my old pregnancy blog, Who are you (and what are you doing in my wife)?. This comes out of a post about the day we brought the pack'n'play home.

...a few hours later, I woke up (as usual) to one of three dogs scratching to go outside in the middle of the night, which (as usual) I sleepily obliged. While the dogs went out to do their thing, I puttered around the living room until the pack'n'play caught my eye. In my late night stupor, I had forgotten all about the thing and it was very disorienting to come face to face with it. My 2 a.m. amnesia kept me from remembering where it had come from and I wasn't entirely sure whether or not we had at some point come home from the hospital with Ava and that she was now lying inside of this strange thing. A few seconds later – less disoriented – I had my bearings and remembered what was going on.

But even then, there was the pack'n'play – a big plastic shrine to the baby gods – resting there in the moonlight.

Like the first time I really noticed BabyCar's protruding belly or felt Ava kick, it was one of those baby reality checks. She's coming. And she'll go in the pack'n'play.

Well last night, I was up with Babe-O at about three in the morning (give or take, thanks to daylight savings time). We were taking our usual comforting walk around downstairs and I almost stumbled over something in the middle of the living room. It was about three feet high and maybe a foot wide, sort of like a tiny version of the obelisk from the 2001 movie or a recessionary Stonehenge. I really had no clue what the thing was and sort of paced around it in circles holding Babe-O trying to decide if I should be concerned.

Then it moved. Fast.

And screamed. Loud.

I almost woke Babe-O up as I stumbled back, thoroughly freaked out at what at that point I was convinced was a crafty dwarf that had Trojan-horsed his way into the house disguised as a UPS package or something. Thankfully that line of thinking went full circle in about a second and a half and my brain finally caught up to what was happening. The strange container was the pack'n'play, which we had just packed up to put in storage.

The moving and screaming was the cat, who was probably pissed that we had packed up what had recently become his primary sleeping place.

Anyway, this was really just a dramatic and complicated way to say that we packed the pack'n'play up for what may be the last time. Over the last fourteen months, it has filled in as Babe-O's living room crib, served as a playpen/babycage, and traveled with us all over the place to give the kid a familiar place to sleep wherever we went. It served us well and now it'll off to storage and then -- perhaps -- to eBay. From that first night encountering the pack'n'play while Amy was still pregnant to last night, just another dad up late with a fussy baby...another piece of the whole story comes full circle.

I know it's a cliché, but that doesn't make it untrue: it goes fast.