No chocolate cake for breakfast

Dr. Trackball is away on a business trip, rolling all over the country and leaving ToT with Minnie and Micro in his charge. I've been a single parent.

It's not easy, but not impossible. My biggest challenge, other than maintaining 1) my sanity, 2) a semblance of responsible parenting and 3) the house, has been to live up to the dad-is-in-charge stories of yore.

But I haven't let the kids have chocolate cake for breakfast.

I'm such a guy failure. The best I can muster is letting certain housework slide. There are no pizza boxes littered around the house, no massively fun outings that Mom would never attempt, no horrible dad slipups, like sending children to school with no lunch. There has been a Chuck E. Cheese run and a Three Stooges DVD Netflixed just to show that things are different without Mom around. I even cut the kids a break on a mental health day off that I took, the end result of which was driving myself crazy and cutting hours of me-time out of the day for no discernible benefit to the kids.

Parental martyrs, whom I already hold in low opinion, are even lower in my estimation given my brief brush with their kind of living. It can't be all about the kids because it's bad for everyone. The next day off the kids will be going to school on time.

So today, we're off to see Shrek 3, even though I'd rather see Pirates or follow my usual Sunday routine and bury my face in some video games or writing. Micro may ruin the whole thing, but Minnie hasn't been able to do much that she wanted given the depleted parental ability to take the kids to separate activities.