toby of the day, 6.28.2008

today, toby went to coyote point with his friends, leaving jon and I alone, adrift, without any idea of how to busy ourselves for a few toddler free hours. Actually, that’s not really true at all. Jon and I both came up with myriad tasks, chores if you will, to accomplish during toby’s field trip. we accomplished none of them. While I was at yoga, the husband of our daycaretaker arrived to get toby. Jon asked what time they would return our boy, and was told 3. this seemed later than we had expected, given that most of the other children with normal sleeping schedules take long naps starting around 1pm, but there was some discussion of saturday traffic and other issues so jon let it go. Daycaretaker’s husband then asked what jon and I planned to do in our free time and jon studiously replied with our list of chores. Apparently, daycaretaker’s husband was not impressed by the laundry list of, well, laundry, at which point it occurred to jon that if we had until 3, there was no reason we couldn’t squeeze in a fancy multi-course lunch before mopping the floors. I got home, we gussied up, and went to lunch, discussing how strange but fortuitous it was that they would be gone so long and wondering if traffic between san francisco and san mateo could really add a couple hours onto a saturday excursion. We ate. It was delicious. As we waited for dessert menus, I checked our phone. And of course there was a message from the daycaretaker proper telling us that she was in front of our house ringing our doorbell, wondering why we refused to come down and collect our child. So I signalled to jon that we urgently needed to leave by cartoonishly swinging my thumb towards the door. We hopped in a cab, sped back across town, and jogged up to our doorstep to find them waiting patiently. We apologized profusely, hoping that we hadn’t turned them off of taking toby on future field trips, since now we’ve figured out that if I’d skipped yoga, we could probably have fit in dessert.