Adventures in Daddysitting

Scene: Busy hospital reception area. A nurse, Jennifer, has just been paged to answer a personal call.

Jen: Hello?

Husband (on phone): Hey, how are you doing honey?

Jen: Oh, not the best day.

Husband: Really, uh . . . sorry to hear that. Why's that?

Jen: It's been kind of crazy around here today. Nothing too bad, just kind of stressful.

Husband: Oh, okay, umm . . . I was just calling with a question. If someone needed stitches would you take them to the pediatrician's office or an urgent care?

Unfortunately this isn't a poorly written excerpt from a mid-season sitcom replacement. This is a poorly written excerpt from last Friday.

Alec was meeting at a McDonalds "restaurant" with an extremely thoughtful professor, who had suggested this meeting place to accommodate a dad who was taking care of his kids for the day. Things were actually going quite smoothly at one point. The kids were stuffing their messy faces with a cinnamon roll and climbing around on the play set. The meeting was productive. In fact we were just about to wrap things up when Lily climbed up on a bench and tried to step from one bench to another. Apparently her foot didn't make a solid connection with the bench; however, on the way down her head did. Things are now running a little less smoothly. Alec's next 5 minutes run as follows:

• Pick daughter up off of the floor. Assess damage.
  
• Clean up blood running down her face and apply pressure to the wound with sandpaper quality McDonalds napkins.
• Ignore customers who are craning their necks to see why that little girl is screaming bloody murder.
• Help son put on his shoes, gather up daughter's shoes, pack stuff up in backpack--all while comforting daughter and maintaining pressure on the wound.
• Apologize profusely to professor, who is apologizing profusely herself, even though this is in no way her fault.
• Buckle daughter in the car seat, buckle son in booster seat, and give daughter a crash course in first aid so that she can apply pressure to her own wound.
  
• Drive. Turn around every 3 seconds to remind daughter to keep pressure on her wound. She seems to be doing a good job of keeping pressure on her nose, cheek and hair. Unfortunately, the cut is in none of those places.
• Physically readjust her hand every 3 seconds to keep pressure in right place.
• Call wife to ask where the nearest urgent care is and realize he doesn't have insurance card.
  

And that takes us back to where we started.

A close up of Lily's stitches--2 on the surface, 1 sub dermal.

Luckily she was back to her normal self pretty quickly. This was taken at a Sun Devil's game that night.

Amazingly it appears that she still trusts/loves her Dad.

Mom, on the other hand, is not so sure and is definitely ready to call it a day.