No Cure For What Ills Her

Today was long. For me anyway. Ginger was still sick this morning, so I had to take over watching the kids today. And in theory I should have been able to go to work for at least two hours, but Ginger didn't want Catherine to go to school since there's a 24 hour fever free policy and Catherine had only been fever free for maybe 18 to 20 hours. This is one of the biggest areas Ginger and I argue over (well, aside from money, but what couple doesn't argue about that). Ginger has this strict letter of the law interpretation where as I'm more of a spirit of the law. This whole 24 hour fever free is just one example since I felt Catherine was fine to go to school and yet Ginger didn't think it was the right thing to do. And this isn't the only time we've clashed on this topic. There was a point today where Ginger was starting to really feel bad, and when I asked if she had taken Tylenol yet, the response was no because it was eight hour Tylenol and it was still 15 minutes until it had been eight hours. Now if it was me at that point, I'm taking the medicine already. In fact, I probably would have taken it fifteen to twenty minutes earlier as soon as I started feeling bad again. And it's not just about medicine either. There's some pediatrician rule about not giving kids real milk until they're one year old and I distinctly remember Ginger at one point not letting me give Quinn milk because it was still five days until his one year birthday. My feeling is that five days when you're talking about a year is statistically insignificant.

Anyway, the fact that Catherine didn't go to school meant I had to watch the kids all day. And today was only a half day at school for Quinn, so we had to head back and pick him up at noon. At that point I decided to take the kids out to eat so that Ginger could get some rest without them making too much noise around the house. I let them choose and Quinn choose Red Robin, but Catherine immediately said no to that. Then Quinn turned on the charm and said "Catherine, did you know that if we go to Red Robin, they have TVs that you can watch while you eat." To which Catherine responded: "That's a great idea! Let's go there." (that was literally her response, afterwards the kids were asking me what I was laughing at).

After we got home, I took them on a walk to a local playground since it was such a nice day (it is December, right?). Hard to believe it was in the low 70s today. We didn't even take coats when we went. And there must have been some playgroup or something meeting at this playground, because when we showed up there were two kids at the playground, then suddenly five mini vans pull into the parking lot and out pop like fifteen kids. A bunch of the boys started playing football and Quinn went over and invited himself into the game. I was somewhat worried that wasn't going to end well for a couple reasons. One reason is Quinn looked to be the youngest and smallest of the kids out there playing. The other reason is Quinn doesn't really know the rules to football. And finally I was concerned about how he tends to react badly to not winning all the time. I'm happy to say though that all my fears were unfounded and that he did fine and never seemed to get upset (I think he was just happy to be playing with them to be honest).


As you can tell I took my camera, but once again screwed up. If you notice the picture above, the kids are horribly out of focus but by golly you can really make out that bench. That's because the last time I had used the camera was taking the out of focus pictures of the Christmas lights outside our house, so it was on manual focus. You would think I would have noticed that right away, but slight fuzziness at high resolution doesn't look so fuzzy when you see it on the camera's tiny LCD screen. One day I'll learn to completely check the mode of the camera before I start using it. That probably won't be for years, but eventually I think I'll learn. So basically after taking about 70 pictures today, I only had about 10 to 15 that happen to be at the right distance that came out looking decent, like the one below.


And no, the kids aren't trying out for a spot in Flock of Seagulls, it was just the wind was blowing a lot today. I mean a lot. And pretty strong. Enough to the point where there were power interruptions. Like when we were in Red Robin and the power flickered and the TVs went out. Ask the kids, that was scary. They didn't know if the TVs would come back on and were worried they might miss the end of the Tom and Jerry Blast Off For Mars movie that was playing on the Cartoon Network.