When my wife left me… Ok I was just told I better clarify that statement if I know what’s good for me. When my wife left for her mini-vacation to visit family in Indiana, she had some concerns that I would not be able to take care of the kids during her absence.
Today marked the end of her vacation and I was to pick her up from the airport. The day started off with a phone call from Trina’s sister at 5:00 AM who called to let me know that she had dropped Trina off at the airport in Chicago. I have come to the conclusion that lack of time zone understanding is a hereditary thing since neither Trina nor her sister can comprehend there is actually a difference in time between east coast and west coast.
I took this call to be kind of like a warning shot. The British were coming and the folks around the countryside were being warned by the phone equivalent of Paul Revere. After I finally woke up from the phone call I lay in bed for a second then leapt up in the realization that my wife would be home in a few hours!
Sleep suddenly was the last thing on my mind. For five days I had let the kids do pretty much what they wanted and now I had just five days to reverse those effects. The first thing I did was to go to each of their rooms and armed with a small mirror I checked to make sure they were all breathing. Whew, at least I didn’t have to devise a plan where I had to go out and rent new kids before the wife came home.
Garbage was gathered; well more to the point garbage was raked into a pile and placed in a plastic bag. Rooms were straightened, ok some rooms were straightened others we just attached signs to the door recognizing them as federal disaster areas with a note that we needed to contact the authorities to see about clean-up funding.
My daughter Mallorie who had been a great help assuming the role of mother during mom’s absence made lunches for the kids and even cleaned out the refrigerator throwing away what looked like a fuzzy version of Thanksgiving dinner we had last November.
Dakota’s bandages were changed and we walked him through his story one more time so that when he was grilled by mom he would give the appropriate answers. Remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.
The plan was that I would drive mom around for a while until things got taken care of. During that time I would try to come up with a plausible story of why the ice maker suddenly didn’t make ice and why her knitting needle was needed as an ice pick.
If that didn’t work, I’d take Trina to Chase Field to the Diamondbacks game to give the kids a little more time to get things in order.
In the end, things worked out. Trina came home and found each of the children was still alive and other than the boy, none of them even had a new scar. Not one of them resembled the little children Sally Struthers was trying to get us to adopt from a third-world country and there was no message from Madonna or Angelina Jolie wanting to adopt one of the kids to get them out of poverty.
All in all, things weren’t that different when Trina was gone. I guess all those hours of watching Man vs. Wild on the Discovery Channel paid off. Well that and the fact that McDonalds is only a mile away and they had a full value menu.
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