new scutmonkey: the 6 stages of overnight call

This may be a slight retread if you follow me on Twitter, but one particularly bad night on call about a month ago, I posted a poll surveying the worst overnight call phenomena. After that...well, after that it was just a matter of drawing the thing.

Here, panel by panel:

For those who are curious, I've been meaning to get back into cartooning for a while now (despite the long hiatus I've actually drawn comics...well, basically my whole life, since I was a very small odd child with too few friends and a bit of a defensive sense of humor to match), but as I noted previously, making these comics does take some significant amount of time. I mean, at least the way I do it, which is extremely analog and old school, it involves many inefficient, labor-intensive steps.

Joe actually got me one of those Wacom tablets about a year ago because I've been yammering about drawing more since forever. He thought, quite logically, that a tablet might be a good tool that could input the my drawings directly into the editing software. It was such a thoughtful gift, but...I don't know. There's something about the tactile sense and resistive friction of drawing with specific tools, and I'm picky enough as it is about my writing implements.

I did try to do a sort of quick and dirty YEARS ago, with this "colonoscopy face" comic...

...which I deliberately did on a yellow notecard just to force me to treat the exercise it casually. I briefly considered doing more things like that--just casual, tossed off, straight ink to paper, no erasing, no post-processing cleanup, nothing. But the fact is that I don't like things that are careless and tossed off. I want to do things how I want to do them, and how I want to do them necessarily takes a certain amount of time. It just does.

Anyway, everyone has their weird outlets. Writing and drawing stupid comics are mine. I hope you liked this one.

one flew over

So we had this bird nest in our garage. Our nanny first noticed it a few weeks ago, high up on a shelf something like eight, nine feet up, propped on a shelf against a corner, atop of a pack of Costco bulk terry cloth towels. We've had a broken window in the garage for...I don't know, probably going on a year now (don't judge), and I suppose it was only natural that at some point, a bird might find its way indoors and make itself at home.

"What kind of bird?" a few people at work asked me when I brought it up, but I couldn't really say, since I never actually saw anyone in the nest. For all I knew, the nest could have been there for months, and I just never noticed it sitting there, high above my head.

However, the nest apparently did have an inhabitant, and around Mother's Day, she let us know.

This also gave me a slightly more specific answer to the "What kind of bird?" question, because at least now I could say, "The kind of bird that lays eggs that look like that." 

The consensus in the anesthesia lounge, both from the build of the nest and the speckling on the eggs, was that these were Carolina wrens. There were five little eggs tucked in there, the size of those Cadbury chocolate eggs with the candy shells sold around Easter (they're what M&Ms should ideally be, in my opinion--better chocolate, thicker shell), and while it certainly made me somewhat monstrous for thinking of this mother bird's clutch of eggs in terms of snack food, I'm sure in the wild, outside of the safety of the high shelf in our garage, the eggs would be a snack for someone.

I had no idea what the gestational age of a baby bird is, particularly when the species is unknown. So I checked on this clutch of eggs a few times, but not daily, as I didn't want to spook the mom (again, I'd never seen her in the nest, for all I knew she'd already abandoned the eggs that the creepy Chinese lady kept peeking at), and anyway, it's not like anything interesting was happening.

Then, one weekend about a week and a half ago while I was in New York, I got a picture text from Joe. 

"I'm not sure if they're dead," his text read, "they're not moving. Maybe the garage was too hot for them?"

Since I was not there, I couldn't really weigh in, and I certainly couldn't tell from the photo. What could we have done, anyway? Put a little mirror under their beaks to see if it fogged up? Put on teeny tiny EKG leads? Put them on ECMO?

"Don't touch them," is all I could think of to reply, "and don't show the kids, it'll make them sad." It was a still photo, but Joe assured me that a video would look no different. And hell, babies that you can't see moving or breathing at all? Sounded pretty dead to me.

When I got home at the end of the weekend, the first thing I did (well, in truth it was maybe the third thing, after putting down my luggage and going to the bathroom) was stand on a chair, put my camera on a selfie stick telescoped out as long as it would go, and take a picture of the nest.

They were not dead. 

I exhaled a long breath I didn't realize I'd been holding in up until that moment.

When I took the MCATs back in--good lord, I think it was the summer of 1997--I remember this one section in the "critical analysis and reasoning" section. This is the part of the test where they give you some deathly dense and deliberately boring excerpt of technical writing and ask you a lot of questions about it afterwards to ascertain that you were able to not only stay awake, but actually retain and synthesize the information. (While this might be a reasonable test for how you would fare in med school, I will venture to say that it has only marginal bearing determining how good of a doctor you might eventually become.) Anyway, most of the sections were, as I said, deliberately inscrutable--an excerpt from a technical manual about how to extract aluminum via electrolysis, for example--but some reading selections were sort of interesting, probably by accident. 

This one I recall was about the breeding habits of certain birds in which "obligate sibicide" was the norm. Meaning: the bird will lay two or more eggs, and as a necessary evolutionary flourish, survival of the fittest, the stronger siblings will kill one or more of the weaker ones. Always. As a rule. I obviously didn't retain too much of what else I had read (though, to be fair, it was more than 20 years ago), but I figured, hey, five eggs is a lot of eggs. Probably by design. It was probably normal to lose a few by attrition. It's likely what we should expect, in fact.

I checked the nest every day (at this point Joe had set up our tallest ladder by the shelving and just left it there because apparently I was becoming the goddamn Birdman of Alcatraz and the ladder was heavy) but I would always approach with this vague, atavistic dread that at some point I'd happen onto one or two or five dead baby birds.

But there were no dead baby birds. Every time I peeked at them (just peeked, never touched), I did a quick head count. I couldn't tell them apart, I didn't name them or anything, I wasn't crazy--but just a quick head count. One, two, three, four, five. Every day, all five were there. 

Sometimes they would be in a different order, sometimes a few of them would be hiding in the back, but always, every day, five of them. They grew.

And grew.

And grew, until their ceiling hung with vines, and the walls become the world all around.

Yesterday, when I went to peek at the birds, it started to look a bit crowded. There was that adolescent gangliness to the brood--they still all seemed content to stay inside, they had a few tufts of baby down showing through, but the nest suddenly seemed like all arms and legs. 

And then this morning, just like that...

...they were gone. 

Joe caught a glimpse of one of the no-longer-babies early this morning, hopping around on a cardboard box by the recycling bin, virtually indistinguishable from the adult birds we'd seen about, but for the few sprigs of downy fuzz it had yet to shed. But by the time I got home from work, none of them were left. The garage was suddenly very quiet.

I'm not totally sure why I'm telling this non-story. After all, it's not really that interesting--lots of people find birds nests near their houses, baby animals come and go all spring and summer, the "empty nest" analogy as applied to human children is trite and hoary, and something I honestly don't really know about yet. (Soon, yes. But not yet.)

I think it was my reaction to the birds. The way I automatically assumed the worst. I think this happens at work a lot--in fact, I think the reason I sometimes assume the worst is because of the work I do. It's like a protective mechanism. You learn the statistics, you recognize patterns, you make predictions, you prepare yourself. Hope for the best, sure; but always, always, always prepare for the worst. Prepare yourself for the bad outcome and you'll never be surprised or disappointed. It's the bad outcomes you allow to blindside you that will truly break your heart.

But you don't always get a bad outcome. Even sometimes, when you should get a bad outcome, when you fully expect it...you don't. You're surprised the other way. People beat incredible odds. Genuine miracles happen. 

When I was a resident doing a rotation in the cardiothoracic ICU, there was a saying we'd murmur to each other back and forth on rounds, under our breath. Well, it was maybe not even so much a saying so much as it was a known phenomenon. "You fly or you die." Patients who had major cardiac surgery seemed to have two paths. Either they would do great--they would fly--or they would limp out of their moment of crisis, hobble through the next few days and weeks, accruing one complication after another, and eventually, succumb. It wasn't absolute, but it held true enough that it was accepted as near uniform fact. You fly or you die.

Life is not nearly as uniform or algorithmic as we would sometimes like it to be, of course. The comfort of a logically predicated outcome and the inurement against heartbreak can sometimes close you off to the possibility of an improbable result. Worse yet, sometimes one becomes so jaded against good things happening that the possibility of a good result seems less likely than it should.

I'm not saying that having five baby birds born in our garage and having all of them survive to leave the nest is an improbable result. From most of my limited conversations with other people who've had firsthand experience in such matters (so...two conversations, then) this in fact seems par for the course. 

But maybe that's not the point either. Maybe the point is just that surprise and delight can sometimes go hand in hand. And that delight can be found in the most improbable places, exactly when you least expect it.

vintage scutmonkey: doctor id

This is a rare bird indeed, in that it is the one Scutmonkey comic that I never disseminated widely. I in fact never completed this strip. This string of panels originally ran with the tag line, "To Be Continued..." but I never followed it up, because...I don't know. I think it just never felt very funny to me. Don't get me wrong, for someone who has worked in the Peds ER, there is a decent dose of acerbic humor in there, but on the whole, when taken with the other comics I wrote, it felt...kind of darkly bitter. A little too much dark, and a little too much bitter.

In retrospect--and I don't think I needed that much distance from that time to realize this, I think I even realized it at the time--there was a point in my first year of Peds residency when I was likely borderline clinically depressed. It was circumstantial depression, certainly--I think many of us were at the time--but nonetheless it was a period of my life that both imprinted deeply and which I don't remember well. Day blended into night, one rotation blended into the next, there was very little time, very little spontaneity, very few genuine sparks of joy that I can recall. This had very little to do with my residency program per se (to this day I have nothing but good things to say about my Pediatrics residency, which turned out some of the finest doctors I know), but had everything to do with the nature of residency itself, which somehow, despite all best intentions, tends to bleed the humanity out of the young people training to take care of human beings at their most needy and vulnerable. It's quite a paradox, when you think about it.

So despite the fact that I cringe a bit reading this now, remember the place I was in when I wrote this, I'll republish this nubbin of a comic from the archives anyway. But I will also link these two things.

One is this older blog entry I wrote seven years ago, entitled, "It Gets Better."

The lowest point in my residency was in January of my intern year. I was a Pediatrics resident back then, doing a month-long rotation on "Team 2," which is what we called the general inpatient pediatric team, with a focus on the patients on our liver transplant service. 

It was a very long month.

I'd get to work at around 5:45 every morning to pre-round, and invariably leave after dark every night--not difficult, considering that, in January, it seemed like it started to get dark around 3:30pm every day. I was there much later than that, of course--most nights I'd leave around 7:00pm, unless I was on call, in which case I'd leave at around 10:00am the following morning. We'd have pre-rounds and then rounds, then attending rounds and work rounds, followed by teaching rounds and radiology rounds, with time at the end of the day for sign-out rounds. Twice a week we'd have Grand Rounds and Chief of Service Rounds. How we ever got anything done with all this rounding, I'll never know. How I ever got to spend time with any patients in between all these rounds is even more of a mystery. It just felt like a day of endless, endless scut. Losing the forest for the trees. It would be a day full of writing down numbers and pagers beeping and phone calls and faxes and entering computer orders, and not nearly enough time practicing medicine or spending time with patients. And then I'd go home and collapse and wake up at 4:15 the next morning to go in and do it all again... 

And let's get this straight. I liked residency. Really, I did. Yes, it was hard, and yes, I was tired basically all the time, but I expected that, and now that it's over, most of my memories are affectionate. Residency, like medical school, was full of stories, and many of them, in retrospect, are funny--not at the expense of patients, but at my own expense, because Lord, how serious and inexperienced and bumblingly well-intentioned I was! But that first January of my intern year, I was very close to being clinically depressed. It just all felt so grim and featureless and endless, and I felt more and more like I was just some kind of task-programmed automaton, not like the doctor that I thought I was supposed to be at this point.

I wanted to quit. Not just quit being a Pediatrics resident, but quit medicine altogether. I was unhappy. I didn't like my life. I wanted to be done. I know that this comic was intended to be a joke, but there were time, real times, when I passed by a Gap or a Starbucks or whatever, saw that they were hiring, and seriously considered stopping by to fill out an application. At least they don't make you take call at The Gap, folding chambray button-down shirts at 2:00am. 

Now I'm going to tell you a secret. Everyone who has been through a residency has felt this way at some point. Everyone. 

Maybe you're feeling this way right now. So here's another secret. There's more to life than this. Even though it feels like residency is your life, it's not. There's more to life. There's more to you. And it gets better.

It gets better.

The second thing I would like to say is this. I am not a great person, and I know this. The people who work in the Peds ER are...incredible. Phenomenal. Superhuman. It is one of the rotations during my residency--both residencies--where I learned the most, and one of the rotations from which I have retained the most indelible memories. There's a chapter from my book, and though this is one of the less sensational excerpts (you would have never centered an episode of ER around it, for example), it's still the one that sticks with me the most.

...[T]here are some subtle changes of the twenty-four hour cycle that, to the experienced eye, can give some clue as to what time of day it is, but otherwise, days and nights in the ER are all pretty much the same, a constant stream of low-grade urgencies punctuated by the occasional heart-stopping emergency. 

In fact, the only event that allows me to reliably tell time in the ER is the 3:00 a.m. sandwich drop, wherein a café across the street, just prior to receiving their bakery-fresh goods for the morning, drops off heaping mounds of day-olds for the patients and staff of the Peds ER to pick through. Walk through the Peds ER at three thirty in the morning and you will find leftover yogurt cups lined with soggy scrims of granola, see patient attacking chicken salad wraps, and watch ward clerks turn away from their work stations to deal with a mouthful of cheese danish. "Try the turkey sandwich," the attending urges a floridly tattooed teenager with the air of insider knowledge, "the bread is really good." 

At these times, the ER feels like it could be anyplace where unlikely company is trapped together for an interminable wait. The DMV, the passport office, an airport terminal after all outgoing flights have been canceled due to a storm.

Anyway. Dr. Id. We don't often immortalize the worst of ourselves in amber, but it's still important to remember that there was a time when that person was there. Is still there at times. And to remember the small moments of happiness and good humor, no matter how inconsequential. And to know that it gets better. To know that you get better too.

It gets better, and you get better too.

young girls have picked them every one

Despite the fact that it's eighty skrillion degrees outdoors in the sun, it's officially Fall, which (at least around here) is the season for a particular brand of autumnal barnyard revels. Most of these places are pretty much the same. There are pumpkins, usually some variant of bounce apparatus, listless animals to pet, perhaps some sort of giant PVC tube slide done on the cheap, a corn maze, hayrides, a train ride where the train cars are inexplicably spotted like a Holstein cow 50% of the time, and perhaps cider with donuts. Standard.

That's not that interesting, because we've all been there, done that. But today we returned to a place we went to last year, Southern Belle Farm. The reason we went back to Southern Belle Farm is because they have a pick your own flower field. You heard me. PICK YOUR OWN FLOWERS. This...is different!

A few reasons we like this place. One is that, unlike the apple orchard we went to two weeks ago, they don't nickel and dime you for every damn thing. One ticket for admission covers everything you could possibly want to do, unless you want to buy food. Second reason is that it's very well-kept. Well laid out, neat, clean, and (at least on the two occasions we've been there), not crowded. Third reason is that right there. Pick your own flowers. 

The flowers are beautiful. I don't know what kind they are (maybe someone could chime in if you recognize them), but there's a giant field of them, organized into deep rows. Flower picking is included in the price of admission ($14 per person between the ages of 3 and 65 years old). You just go in and pick as many as you want to take home. Last time we came we didn't know about the pick your own flowers, so we weren't quite prepared. The stems are pretty fibrous so it's hard to pick them with just your hands, and also we didn't have anywhere to put the flowers, so they were all wilted and dead by the time we got home. But this time I was prepared, boy. I had a bucket. I had cold water . I had garden shears for each kid. FORESIGHT IS 20/20 (is a thing that over-planners should smugly start saying).

Oh, and just this last. On our way to the car, we passed the corn maze. My kids don't want to do cornmazes anymore because the last time we did one we got lost (an anxiety-provoking experience enhanced by the fact that I was actually on backup call that day and anxious about my potential for ready egress already) but I don't think this formative trauma prevents them from standing near corn. (Yet. I suppose there's still time for them to be PTSDed by the Iowa caucus later on.) So I told them to stand amidst the corn and peek their faces out, because that would be a great "Children of the Corn" joke that might be funny...to me. It was a marginal success, if you consider the margin to be the floor. Maybe in addition to garden shears, I should have brought scythes.

(Thanks to Andrew Moore for recommending this place to us last year. We'll miss you, Good Andrew.)

reading the room

I'm going to be out of town for four days next week (see: yesterday's post), so I signed up to be the "parent reader" for Nina's kindergarten class today. Because of guilt. Oh yeah, also I wanted to promote literacy and volunteer my time and surprise my kid at school. But mainly guilt.

I've done this "parent reader" gig a few times in the past, and I've learned a few things along the way. The first time I did it this, when Cal was in Pre-K, it took a lot more planning and schedule swapping (I was still working full time back then), so it was a higher pressure situation all around. I actually had to get some kind of special dispensation from the teacher to switch slots, since "parent readers" were supposed to come in only for the kids' SUPER DUPER ALL ABOUT ME SUPERSTAR week, and on Cal's original week I was work-scheduled up to the gills. (Cal went to a private school in midtown Atlanta at the time, and as a general rule I've noticed private schools are much less understanding about parents not being able to drop every damn thing and show up midday for stuff on short notice.) But anyway, that first time, the book I brought was...well, I thought it was a good idea. It was one of Cal's favorite books. It was by Dr. Seuss. We had a big hardcover with pictures that everyone could see, even all the way in the back. I loved this book as a kid myself. Right here:

MAJOR ERROR. First of all, the book is 64 pages long. Second of all, it has way too many words. Third, too much lingual dexterity is required, so you can only read it so fast.

Oh, brother.

I think by page four of the Happy Birthday book, the kids in the class were flopping around on the floor, running around the back of the room, and generally talking through the whole thing. (Even my own kid was losing interest, and this was HIS BOOK.) I think I skipped a whole chunk of pages in the middle, just to get through it (no one noticed), and at the end, one of the teachers came up to me and said (sympathetically, helpfully), "Yeah, I find that...shorter books are...usually better choices."

I'm not a naturally performative person. I will read to my own kids but I don't naturally have the type of personality that makes me want to read to all kids. I'm not even sure that I like most kids that aren't my own kids. But I can limp through this "parent reader" type of thing OK, because now I know to make better book choices. In sum:

* Keep it short. 

* Keep it pithy.  

* It doesn't matter if it's "too easy" for your kid. The other kids don't care how sophisticated your child's taste is, and the teacher isn't making judgements on your household or your kids' I.Q. if you end up choosing SPIDER-MAN'S POP-UP LASER TAG ADVENTURE for your parent reader selection, so long as the kids in the class stay out of her hair for ten minutes so she can check her e-mail and finish her sandwich.

* Pick books that are funny, where you can really act out the voices, are almost always successful if you're willing to go there. 

* For God's sake, don't read The Giving Tree unless you want to cry in front of a bunch of five-year olds like some kind of psycho. In fact, I try to stay away from melancholia altogether, because I hate feelings. Where the Wild Things Are? Get outta here. The Runaway Bunny? Fuck you.

* Bring a selection, and let the kids choose, but know that there will be split votes and you'll have to end up reading pretty much all of them.

So here are the ones I brought.

Not pictured: Don't Push the Button (which is kind of a dumb book, but interactive--and yes, I know the book was not written for me, but it's still dumb) and The Monster at the End of This Book, which is actually the perfect book for this kind of thing, but it's only available in teeny tiny board book or Little Golden Book size, and also I can't find our copy. (Those groovy fonts, tho!)

We ended up having time to read three. Don't Push the Button as a warm-up act, This Is Not My Hat as the headliner (I like the art in that one, as well as in John Klassen's other book I Want My Hat Back--first in a three part hat oeuvre, I suppose), and closing with that old evergreen Don't Let The Pigeon Drive the Bus.

"How come you have so many funny books?" this one kid in the front row asked me at the end. Like it was some kind of accident. Kid, you don't even know.

weekend warriors

I have this phenomenon in my house--you may be familiar with it in your own--where I need to get my kids out of the house on weekends to do something. It barely matters what. Really, it could be anything. The playground is a nice, easy choice. Or hiking, we like to do that. If it's rainy or cold, the Georgia Aquarium is clutch, or the Tellus Science Museum, or sometimes (when we're feeling a little least earnest in our intentions), any of a number of indoor playgrounds, plus or minus go karts. But the reason I need to get my kids out of the house on weekends is the same reason you need to walk your dogs. Well, maybe not in order to poop on the street, but really, the point of taking kids out on the weekend is to wear them out. You need to take that full gas tank full of hyperactive aimless kid juice and run it down, my droogs. Otherwise, the kids start to get bored. And when they get bored, they get fractious. And when they get fractious, they start to complain, and I can't be hearing any of that, because the complaining inevitably leads to screentime begging, which is THE WORST KIND OF BEGGING. (Generally speaking, my kids only get screen time on the weekends, and they know this, so this leads to a kind of hoarding mentality about screen time that is somewhat counterproductive. It's like food insecurity that you sometimes see in kids who grew up not having enough to eat, only my kids have had plenty to eat, and also they get plenty of screentime, so everyone shut up, don't you know I grew up unironically using a rotary phone, yet still, to my knowledge, have never complained about boredom as much as you three seem to?)

Sometimes on the weekend, they will be playing very nicely with each other in the morning, and Joe will suggest, hey, maybe we'll just let them hang out at home and do nothing and just have a low-key morning at home. And...OK, look. I love my spouse, I cherish his input, but sometimes I also wonder when he will ever get tired of being WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME, EVER. Because what happens is this. The kids play very nicely at home for a few hours. But then they get bored. And then they start complaining, "What are we going to do today? Where are we going to go? Why can't we go out to do something else?" Like we were cruelly holding them captive at home against their will! But by then, it's too late! The opportunity window has closed! By the time you let them realize that going out is the best course of action, it's too late to go out to do anything good, and then they're pissed, and you're pissed, and everyone is pissed, and in order to defuse the situation you just end up letting them play Minecraft for a million hours which makes them even more avolitional and makes you feel guilty for being That Piece of Shit Parent and then your weekend is RUINED.

I put this out there because several people have told me that I seem to take my kids to do a lot of things on the weekends, but it's really not anything that reflects well on me, because the only reason I get them out of the house is because I DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH THE COMPLAINING. I don't want to hear it, I don't want to respond to it, I don't want to try to troubleshoot it, and I certainly don't want to feel guilty for how I eventually deal with it. I don't want to do any of that. I just want to avoid the whole thing. Hence, the weekend activities.

So. This morning we went to do some strawberry picking at Washington Farms.

We have gone fruit picking many, many times before, though never at Washington Farms. The reasons we went to that particular location this weekend are as follows.

1.) They sent me an email from their mailing list, so I remembered that they existed.

2.) I usually buy two flats of strawberries from Costco per week, but this past week the strawberries they had on offer looked like hot moldy garbage, and...

3.) I saw some mention of a Super Spring Saturday petting zoo. Nina likes petting zoos.


So, Washington Farms! Bright and early this morning! So here was the part where I had to steer my kids into the skid a little bit. It's still the beginning of strawberry season in Georgia, so the crop isn't so robust yet, and I was worried that they would get picked out if we didn't show up early enough. (Their website warned of the same, and actually suggested that people call them to check on crop availability before driving in.) So I wanted to get to the farm on the earlier side. However, waking your kids up even five minutes earlier than they prefer to wake on the weekends is a recipe for them deciding that they don't waaaaaant to go pick strawberries. Why do we haaaaaave to go? Why can't we get strawberries at the stooooooore? So, what's a loving, engaged parent to do in response? Why, merrily ignore them, of course! (Really, what I said was this. I know. You think you don't want to go. But trust me, you're going to have fun.)

And they did.

Washington Farms was having a Super Spring Saturday this weekend, which means that in addition to the strawberry picking, there was your standard variety of Family FFarm FFFun offerings on tap, including A Bounce Thing:

An Animal Thing:

A Weird PVC Tubing Slide Thing:

And a Thing Where One of Your Kids Somehow Gets Buried In a Mound of Dried Corn:

Anyway, Washington Farms. Strawberry picking was a success, although now I feel like we're going to be basically eating strawberries defensively until they're all gone. (Last time we went strawberry picking, I made strawberry jelly, though I think I screwed up the recipe somehow, mostly because I didn't follow the recipe on the pectin box exactly. They told me how much sugar to put in and it was an almost sarcastic amount of sugar, and I though surely, that can't be right, and I'm a doctor, therefore I know EVERYTHING, so I cut it by 25%. So it turns out that the instructions were screaming at me to follow what they said the letter for a reason, because that jelly turned out kinda...not so jelled. But anyway. Color me chastised.) The Spring Fun activities were truly fun, and although we only spent about 45 minutes doing the actual fruit picking, we probably spent another 3+ hours there just doing the rest of the stuff. That coupled with the hour it took to drive home means that my kids didn't start thinking about screen time until past 4:00pm. And that, my friends, is what we call #winning. I've already cleared a place on my desk for my Parent of the Year award--it can sit right next to that pile of school papers I forgot to sign and the class pictures I forgot to pay for but also never returned. What? WHAT?