Piercing the Darkness

Matthew | October 26, 2009 | 0 Comments

power-outage By Matthew Sherman
We experienced baby’s first power outage last night. It wasn’t a big deal. Once we got candles and flashlights etc… it was actually kind of fun to watch Elliott’s reaction. He was mesmerized by the candles and why wouldn’t he be? They instantly became the single most dangerous thing in the house and, therefore, he had to try and get them.

We also played a fun game in which we tried to get Elliott to go to various places in the room by having him chase the light of the flashlight. It was great until we realized we were treating him like a cat. And of course there’s nothing like a power outage to make you feel like an idiot. Not only did I attempt to flip on the kitchen light on a good 9-10 times, I also played this game: “Oh, I wonder what the score in the Beavers game is. I’ll just turn on the…. Oh yeah. Well I’ll just check it on the inter… Oh… Wait, I’ll just watch Sportscent… Oh. Sigh, I guess I’ll just talk to my wife or something.”

But getting the house to a state of readiness and functionability was a little trickier than normal. The power went out while we were running errands and it was dark outside when we got back. So the house was pitch black with nothing short of a minefield of baby toys strewn between us and a flashlight or lighter. Figuring we could best use our resources by spreading out, Shelbi put Elliott down to the logical statement of: “He can’t see anything, where’s he going to go? Two seconds later we hear the frantic ‘thump, thump thump!’ of speed-crawling. Now the baby is loose in the pitch black house. It was kind of like a horror movie except with a baby in place of a zombie and there were no infrared goggles.

After a few seconds of tripping over Matchbox cars and blocks, we heard a familiar cheerful women’s voice say: “Let’s get moving!” That was quickly followed by the song: “Get ready to clap! Get ready to snap! Get ready to wiggle and giggle bounce and bop and tap!” Elliott had crawled over to his numbingly annoying walker and, in doing so, set off its series of flashing lights accompanied by the song. We used the lights from the walker to manuever the darkness and found our flashlights in no time. And I can’t help but be a little creeped out that he may have known exactly what he was doing.