Single Fatherhood: Day 1

6:50 AM, shaking Julie's legs

"Joules, it's time to wake up." Her first response is to barely open her eyes. When she recognizes it's me, she closes them again.

"Joules, you get to go play with Chumby today! Do you want to go play with Chumby?"

No response.

So I shaker her a little again. "Julie, do you want to get out of bed?"

In her sing songy voice, "No."

"You just want to go back to sleep?"

That same lyrical voice, "Yeah."

Ten minutes later she was awake and wanting to be held. She got cereal for breakfast before we changed her and grabbed her things. She was mostly ignored, though, while Janelle and I gathered up the last things for camp and loaded them into a friend's van. Shortly after they left, Joules and I went to Chumby's house. She marched in without hesitation and without so much as a good-bye.

My work day started at Hillcrest. Somehow I've become the Clinic's expert on accessing information from the obstetric database there, which is a little frightening, seeing as my approach to data extraction is a slightly enhanced version of guess and check. I like to call it barely-educated guess and check. After a couple of hour of fighting the database and getting about half of what I wanted, I went back to the main campus.

I felt good about my afternoon's work as I finished up a project that I should have finished at the end of last week. The mood was fouled by a trio of factors, though. 1) whereas my computer failed Monday morning, the hard drive had to be wiped. Not everything got installed the same way, which means a couple of vital programs aren't working as they should. The end result--no reports. 2) An e-mail from an investigator complaining about 'problems' in my analysis that he wants me to fix. The problems reflect imperfections in the data, which can't possibly be fixed. This is the fourth or fifth time we've had this discussion. 3) the Systems people showed up at 4:25 to reinstall printer drivers. I needed to pick up Julie at 5:00, and finally left work at 4:55.

At last, I picked up Julie. She was asleep when I arrived, but not for long. She stumbled down the stairs at Chumby's house, wearing one of Chumby's shirts, with an enormous contusion under her left eye. Carrie apologized profusely, but I brushed it off. Kids happen after all. But I'll be perfectly honest--I wasn't prepared for how bad it was. It doesn't look like a bruise though, more like she got pinched. She was pretty cuddly for a while, and I can tell it still bothers her a little.

Pizza for dinner. Nice and simple. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it's cold water to remove stains from a white shirt before washing it? Yeah, that's right Carrie...she got pizza sauce all over Chumby's sparkling white shirt. Payback's a...lot more work for me.

We did manage to weed the garden today though. Well, I did anyway. Joules snuck back inside, climbed to the top of the pantry, and pulled down the giant jar of jolly ranchers. Now she's watching Harry Potter and waiting for the sugar high to tail off so we can go to bed. Hopefully I can get some laundry folded.

Many thanks to Carrie for watching Joules today. And especially for the bread. It turns out I'm out of bread...I'm almost out of milk too. Just not enough time left today to go to the store.

Things left to do today:

Dishes
fold laundry
wash another load of laundry
clean Chumby's shirt
put away toys in the basement