Friday, September 2, 2011

The Time Multiplier

I know I'm stating the obvious to anyone who's had children, and this isn't something I just discovered today, but things take a lot longer when you have kids.

After last night's botched trip to the library, I had to head back with Elliott today. The first delay was waiting for her to wake up and eat. I figured that if I let her sleep until she was hungry and left right after she ate, I'd be able to make it to Provo and back before she got hungry and fussy again.

She slept through the entire drive in, and she was pretty calm when I walked over to the library with her in the Baby Bjorn. (I noticed during the summer semester that I get all kinds of "isn't that cute" looks when I walk around campus with Elliott. It was funny then, but now that there are so many people on campus it makes me a little uncomfortable.)

As soon as we set foot in the periodicals section of the library, however, Elliott decided that she would scream every time I stopped moving. This made it very tricky to get things done.

I still couldn't get the moving shelves to move, so I asked a librarian for help. She came over and pressed the same button I had been pressing and the shelves moved, so maybe the problem was me. But it turned out that the volume I needed was in an auxiliary storage area, so I wouldn't have had any luck last night even if I had figured out the shelf thing.

Anyway, once I got the article I needed I had to figure out how to scan it. Normally, that's pretty easy. But as I already mentioned, Elliott had decided to start screaming every time I stopped moving. And since I was in a crowded library, that meant I couldn't stop moving. After several attempts to get her to be quiet long enough for me to scan my article, I gave up. I tried calling Amy, but she was unavailable. I decided my only choice was to hang out on campus until she was done with her class or her meeting or whatever else she was up to so I could leave Elliott with her for five minutes and scan my article.

Fortunately, just as I was leaving the library I ran into another guy from law review who took five minutes and scanned the article for me. And that was that. In short, I ended up spending over an hour to do what should have taken ten minutes. Daddy-daughter bonding time, I guess.

And of course, Elliott fell asleep as soon as we got back to the car and didn't wake up until after we got home.


Daddy's little monster.

1 comment:

Amy said...

I feel bad now - the reason I was unavailable was actually that I accidentally left my phone in the car instead of taking it in with me and didn't even know you called until I got back to my car after work and saw the phone sitting on the seat. I'm glad you got what you needed done anyway.