Smarts

Last night Harper slept through the night--sort of. She slept through the night if 4:45am counts as morning. Even if it doesn't, she still slept for eight hours, which is a big accomplishment.

It's an even bigger accomplishment because 30 minutes after we put her down, our smoke detectors went off. Two months ago we kept having some malfunction where all of our smoke detectors would go off for about 15 seconds every half hour. We changed the batteries multiple times, but after working for a day, they would suddenly go off again--and of course, they would always go off just after you'd fallen asleep, so that you woke up in a panic and couldn't get back to sleep for 29 minutes--just in time for them to malfunction again.

Anyway, the smoke detectors went off again last night for the first time in months, and Joe and I had very different reactions. Joe immediately leaped off the bed and out the bedroom door. As he hit the hallway he said, "You grab the girl [meaning the baby]." It was at this point that I, still sitting on our bed with my book, realized that he thought this was real. So I yelled over the beeping, "It's just that stupid smoke detector again," and I stayed where I was. Right after I finished saying that I was proven right by a sudden stop to the beeping, but I had to wonder about my reaction. How did I know that it wasn't real? I'd just adopted the same attitude I take whenever a car alarm goes off in a parking lot: "Stupid, malfunctioning piece of equipment contributing to noise pollution."

I often make fun of Joe for immediately assuming that the house is falling down when he hears a small noise in another room, or that someone is trying to break down our front door whenever he hears (or thinks he hears) a car door shut outside at night. But as I was checking on the baby (who seemed to have slept through the whole thing, which is mildly concerning), I wondered if maybe his reaction to the smoke detector was smarter than mine. He might be a bit paranoid, but he his a smart guy. And then I heard a surprised, "Wowza" from downstairs.

"What's 'wowza'?" I asked as he came up the stairs.
"I just checked the battery I took out, and it had plenty of juice," he said.
I looked at him suspiciously, knowing that we do not have a battery tester. "What do you mean you checked the battery?"
He looked at me with "Duh" clearly written on his face and said, "I put it on my tongue, and wowza! Plenty of juice. So I saved it."

Yep, that's my smart husband: paranoid about the sound of a car door closing, but shocking his tongue with batteries to save us 25 cents. Maybe I'm the more rational one after all.