The Mysterious Pee in the Night

My brother and I had stories read to us until we were really pretty old. I can’t peg the exact age this family tradition was abandoned, but I’d wager it went on well past the norm, all of us gathered on my parents’ bed. I think eventually my brother withdrew a properly disdainful distance from the rest of us, when he got Like, Embarrassingly Old, but he was still there, listening.

Mom read us books like The Borrowers, and Five Children and It, and she did voices for all the characters — quite an astonishing feat, really, I now recognize. Dad read us, among others, all the James Herriot books (All Creatures Great and Small, et al.,) and The Complete Works of Arthur Conan Doyle. He read them straight, no extra voices, but with a lot of zest. And I recall him laughing so hard at some of the Herriot that he’d have to choke out the sentences with tears coming down his face.

My brother is a bit over 2 and a half years older than I and wicked bright, and I don’t recall any dumbing-down of literary selections for my benefit. So it was at a fairly tender age that I was along for the Doyle, which is my excuse for not having retained quite as solid a grasp as my brother has on some of the lesser-known Sherlock Holmes tales.

I do, however, remember this axiom from the dude in the deerstalker: When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

(Yes, I cheated and looked it up on The Google just now in order to tell you it is from The Sign of Four. I should have just called my brother.)

Which brings me, more or less, to this post. Yesterday morning Kira woke about 6:30, which is pretty par for the course. First order of business is a trip to the potty; she’s been diaper-free since she was shy of two and the nighttime bit came right along with the rest, much to our utter astonishment after a year of night diapers with #1. She’s had maybe 2 nighttime accidents ever, but she can’t quite make it through til morning, so we usually do a service before we turn in ourselves to avoid that 4a.m. wakeup call.

So husband goes in at 6:30, blearily, to get her, does the potty thing, and brings her into our bed where I’m still half-snoozing. I catch a whiff of eau-de-pee, but her zip-up footed sleeper is dry, so I don’t think much of it and she snuggles on in. Before long she starts asking for her blanket, and I hoist myself up and head to her room to get it. Being not far short of legally blind, I do everything at this hour by feel: reach into the crib, toward pale mound brain has registered as approximately the right size for the blanket. Yep, that’s it. But wait, it’s… wet. Quite wet. And hmm, there’s a distinct pee odor about the room.

Remembering the dry pj’s, I query husband: “Did you change her jammies?” He replies in the negative. “Did you take her blanket into the bathroom with you?” Negative again. I do a mental inventory: no bottle, no sippy cup, no nothing. There is no ceiling leak, nor is it raining. I head back to our bed and do a thorough pajama check. Desert dry.

But she has, I realize, recently started learning to unzip them and get her arms out, though the notion that she accomplished some sort of a nocturnal Houdini maneuver smacks of the fantastic. But Doyle dictates my next question.

“Kira, did you take your jammies off and go pee in your crib?”

Quite triumphant, she responds, “Yes! An’ put ‘em back on!”

Mystery solved, at least the how.  As for when, and moreso why, we may need Sherlock himself.