PSF - Never Take a Half Day Off in the Morning

Last week, I found out that Dova's preschool class was hosting a Mother's Day brunch this Monday. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to take one of my mandatory days off and spend some quality time with my daughter. Since I needed to take a half day later in the month, I opted to take just the morning off. I could also have a nice quiet lunch with Doug before heading back to work, since both kids were in school that day. On Friday last week, our customer called to set up a teleconference as soon as possible. I suggested Monday at 2pm. He called back saying that not everyone could make it, and changed it to 1pm. Sure that would be fine...

I got to do all of Doug's stay-at-home chores on Monday morning, making lunches and driving the kids first to Adam's bus stop and then to Dova's preschool. We arrived a few minutes earlier than the start of the brunch at 9am, so I took Dova outside to join her class. I said, "Go ahead and play, I'll just watch from here." Mortified, she replied, "Mom, you have to go inside, there are no other moms here!" So I went inside and watched through door. Hmmph!

When the kids came inside, she finally allowed me to sit next to her during circle time because other moms had arrived. We then had a nice spread of cinnamon buns, mini donuts, cantaloupe, apple strudel with iced tea or juice. And here is a photo I took for iPhone bytes and Twitter:



Cute, eh? What you don't know is that I took three shots prior that all looked like this:



She kept scowling at me until I offered to get her another donut and then her smiles magically came out.  Later, I took this photo of Dova beading a necklace for me.  Again, she refused to look at the camera or smile but with the sunflower, it came out fine.



I got home around 10:15am.  Doug and I planned to take a walk together and then head out for lunch around 11am so we would have plenty of time. Except our network printer wasn't working. So I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out the problem, only to fix it by rebooting the printer. The gremlins have been hitting our network hard recently, and I've spent more time as network admin more than any other household chore! Finally we headed out for our walk and by the time we got back, it was around 11:45am. Now there wasn't enough time to head to a nice restaurant for lunch, so we decided to go to a local cafe.  We took two cars, so I could go directly to work afterward. When we arrived, we found they weren't open on Mondays so we headed to another cafe a couple blocks away. Since this place only had on street parking, we left my car and took one car over. Finally at 12:15pm we ordered a salad and a sandwich and sat at a beautiful cozy corner window table.



We got to chatting and before I knew it, I looked at a clock and it said 12:40pm. What? I gotta get to work right now! It would take 15 minutes to get there and then I would barely have enough time to turn on my computer to find out the teleconference information. And our food had not arrived yet! I assumed that this was a sandwich shop which could crank out orders in no more than five minutes tops. Apparently not, even Krusty Krab could do better. And I was just about to post this beautiful photo looking out the window but ran out of time.



I asked Doug to have them pack our lunches to go. We ran into his car, made an illegal U-turn, and drove to my car. I had the lunches in my lap. When I handed Doug his styrofoam box, I saw new grease stains on my favorite wrinkle-free Eddie Bauer khakis. Argh!!! I rushed to work, arriving at 12:58pm and the customer called just as I got to my desk. I had to eat while on the call in a conference room in front of another colleague. So much for a relaxing half day off.

So hopefully, time will erase the backstory of Dova's foul mood and the Main Street Cafe f-ups, and someday all I'll remember are these idyllic photos.  One thing is for sure, I will never take a half day off in the morning or go back to the Main Street Cafe.


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