Outsmarted

So there I was, having made it home from work in one piece, the shopping had been done and all was set for an evening of relaxation with the missus and our absolutely gorgeous three-months old twins. Little did I know what fate, by means of my better half, had in store for me.

First things first: a little more than three months ago the missus gave birth to twins - a boy and a girl - and since then our lives have revolved around a steady routine of diaper changes, baby baths and feedings. That's not to say it isn't enjoyable, it's just routine, but it has no real bearing on my anecdote for today - I just mentioned it to get a little backstory in place.

Yesterday was no different at first. I came home, and found the twins gesturing enthusiastically for cuddles and food, but first their diapers had to be changed for new ones. The mechanics and logistics of this is certainly not a problem, though at times it might involve highly unpleasant smells and sights. Still, there are worse things, right? Anyway, the missus took hold of the boy and went to sort him out with fresh clothes and a clean diaper. After a couple of minutes she returned with a happy grin all over her face, and she proclaimed with loving enthusiasm that "Great! His poo has taken on a lovely consistency similar to toothpaste, and now it has turned brightly yellow!" She was bordering on ecstatic ... because of the consistency and colour of poo.

Okay, so the little guy has had some stomach issues the past couple of weeks, and it's good to know that he is on the mend, but damn! There's only one poo story I've ever enjoyed, and I'm really not all that interested in neither consistency nor colour. Frankly I find it somewhat unpleasant to talk about poo, stool, feces or just plain shit. But I've got to laugh though, because until the twins were born, so did the missus.

Now for the second bit of my anecdote.
The twins have grown, and while we up until yesterday has had them sleeping together for comfort and warmth, they have now gotten too big for this to be practical in their cots. So, we had to rearrange their beds and sleeping stations by installing separate beds for the twins in our bedroom, and the cot that used to sit in our livingroom then had to be replaced with a "travel cot" we had stuffed into a closet. So far so good, but then it was up to me to get the bed out and mounted in our livingroom.

So I fetched the package-of-bed from the closet and carried it with me to the livingroom. When packaged it is stuffed into a bag roughly the same size as any other travellers bag. However, when I pulled it from the bag, this is what I was presented with:

Trust me when I say that this is a contraption of pure evil, and if I ever were to meet the engineer responsible for constructing or designing it, we shall have words! Words I say!

I take a certain amount of pride in the fact that I am able to take apart and reassemble pretty much anything, but this thing is simply beyond the scopes of reason, logic and normal mechanics. In order to make it take on it's intended bed-like shape you'd have to grab the long bars by the center and then pull upwards rapidly until they snap into place. Well, I pulled and I pulled and I pulled, but nah ... no snapping shut. Instead it managed to land on my foot which today is swollen and tender (that pic is not my foot by the way, but it serves its purpose of illustration).

Eventually I decided to try to outsmart it. So I gently grabbed the long side bars by the center and tried coaxing them together, and what do you know? Suddenly I managed to get one of the long bars locked, and then the other one. However, by this time the cot had seen through my ruse, and as I moved on to try to get the short bars locked, no amount of pulling, twisting, prying, bending or cursing would achieve anything other than unlocking one of the long bars again.

In the end I managed to get the long bars locked again, and left it with short bars unlocked. It's not entirely upright, but it can contain the twins until my next attempt. I'll be damned before I let a simple travellers cot defeat me, so I've got a sort of cold war going between me and the cot. Let's see who's the patient one.