"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Tuesday, March 22
Hurt/Comfort
I managed to survive Spring Break last week. Because my wife's back in school, we decided not to go out of town but to get stuff done around the house. What did I do all week? Well:
Sat. - Sun: Wife in school. I watched the three kids, made breakfast and lunch, and generally played Mr. Mom.
Monday: Nice weather. Off to the zoo. Fortunately the animals were not as frisky as when we went last spring ("Aww, look at the monkeys. What are they- Okay, kids, time to move on!!").
Tuesday: Pulling weeds. For like 5 hours. Then off to my 8-year old's baseball practice, where I was pressed into duty as a temporary assistant coach.
Wednesday: I absolutely cannot remember what I did on Wednesday.
Thursday: More weeds. More baseball.
Friday: Wife left at 10am to get a haircut. Got back at 4:30, wearing new clothes. I suspect shopping, but maybe it's just stealing.
Sat. - Sun: Wife in school. Mr. Mom redux.
Oh, and I took my daughter to the hospital when she broke her arm.
There's a funny story behind that - wait, it's actually not very damn funny at all. A couple of weeks ago, my wife caught our son and his friends goofing around on the trampoline, and decided there and then that it had to go. We've had it about a year, but it's really to big for our yard and is killing our grass, so I didn't complain too much.
We had a buyer on the last day of vacation, but he couldn't pick it up until this week, so I started dismantling it. Like a dumbass I took the net down but didn't finish taking apart the rest of it.
My wife also bought a new puppy this weekend, not pureblood but it looks like a blond Labrador retriever (and lays around like a hound dog). My daughter, all of 5 years old, went out in the back yard to play with it. No one suspected she'd get up on the trampoline...
So, I'm upstairs in the TV room, decompressing from Daddy Day-Care duty, when I hear my daughter screaming and my wife yelling for me. I go to the first floor at Mach 3, and the first thing I see is my daughter, her hand wiggling up and down like it was about to jump off the end of her arm and go scuttling across the floor. My eyes bugged out like a cartoon wolf's and I shouted something incoherent, but I managed to keep it together enough to get her, the other kids, and my wife in the car.
The nearest hospital is only about 5 miles away - a trip that took 3 weeks to complete. My daughter was still crying, with a fresh scream for every bump we hit, my older son was so freaked out he was bawling until he gagged, and I kept repeating that the doctors would fix her arm, as if saying it would make it so.
We get to the Emergency Room, we get checked in, and the usual crew of three-toed sloths - very nice, super competent, but still, three-toed sloths - start working. I rub her head to relax her, and after she gets a pain shot, she eventually falls asleep. My wife leaves to drop the other kids with a neighbor, turn off the stove, and fetch the puppy from the trampoline, where he's still stuck.
Long story short (too late! Shut! Up!), we get home at 1am with her in an above-the-elbow cast. The next morning she feels much better, and by the end of the day she's cataloging reasons she likes having her arm broken: "You get all the ice cream you want, you can watch TV all day, people bring you presents..."
Despite the painkillers, she's even lucid enough to tell me that when I saw her, I said, "Oh my God!"
"You shouldn't take God's name in vain, Daddy," she said seriously. (Remember, five years old.)
I laughed pretty good at that and replied, "Believe me, I wasn't taking His name in vain. That was a prayer!" And an answered one, at that.
In Other Daddy-Related News: Sean Doolittle has something very important to tell you. Not book related, but some things are more important.
