Grandma M! he laughed.

This being in the morning with the whole thing over with, I guffawed: “I had the same thought!”

Our oldest was born during our grad student days and when she was maybe two months old we got invited to the wedding reception of an old friend of his. Who happened to live in a small town high in the mountains in Utah a few miles from his grandmother.

We were Saving The Planet (yes kids that was a thing in our day too) and not using disposable diapers. We had cloth diapers, but not just any cloth diapers, they closed with velcro so you wouldn’t have to worry about stabbing your baby in the dark of the night. Or you.

Grandma offered to watch the baby for a couple of hours while we headed over.

We forgot to tell her, but figured velcro is pretty self-explanatory anyway.

We didn’t stay long, but when we came back Grandma was trying to be nice but clearly she. was. ticked.

Where were the diaper pins?! How could we hand her a kid with no pins on her diaper? Did we know just how long it had been since SHE’D had a kid in diapers–and she had to go FIND the stupid things?

Bless her heart–she did it.

After we got home an hour away and fed and went to change the baby, size-wise on her she was wearing kilt pins and we realized what we’d done to his poor grandmother.

The at-home sleep study that I drove three and a half hours a day for two days to drive Richard to/from work to have the car to pick that equipment up and drop it off again the next day?

It only got the oxygen reading on the finger. They wanted a do-over.

I told them, well, the velcro on the chest belt did keep giving way gradually and I kept pushing it back up all night.

No commute problems this week.

So I got the equipment back yesterday, set it up, and again the velcro just wasn’t doing its job well enough. I reviewed the video again. Nope, I was doing it exactly the way that guy was.

Dang.

It was a miserable enough night ahead with prongs in my nose, rubber on my finger, a belt around my chest, tubes in the way whenever I tried to roll over and #$!-unhelpful lights on the equipment that stayed on all night that I wasn’t going to do this a third time. I went looking and I did, I found a large safety pin and I pushed it in place to hold that belt and I definitely called the entire contraption stupid in my frustration.

The pair of green lights in the morning conveyed that the test had worked this time. (Waiting for confirmation on that.)

But I thought you had to be a *great* grandma to safety pin velcro.