In search of a “day off”

Every working parent, at one time or another, has experienced the futility of a planned day off from work.

We’ve grown to accept the fact that time away from work nearly always involves a sick kid, a field trip, a school holiday, or, the dreaded early school dismissal.

If you are brave enough to plan a day away from work when none of the above are involved, you can be sure that one or more of the above will be involved, anyway.

Yet, we persist.

I carefully planned to take today off because I had a number of things to do, most of which involved a great deal of online work.

I took everyone to school, went to a coffee shop with wireless internet, bought my required cup of coffee, fired up the computer, started the tunes, put in my earphones, and, my cell phone rang.

It was my husband. School had just called to tell him that our youngest had likely broken his arm.

Since I’m the nurse, and, my husband can’t even think about a broken bone without fainting, I reversed everything I had just done, and, left the coffee shop, and, went back to school.

He looked none so good, so we went to the hospital. Five hours later, they let us know there is no fracture so, we went home.

Needless to say, the rest of the day yielded no work done, and, in terms of me getting to complete any task, at all, got worse from there.

I finally gave up trying to do anything after a pestilence of frogs swarmed the street after a heavy rain while I was on my way to an unplanned service call to my dad’s computer at 8:30 this evening.

It was a sign.