I’m helping my church’s bell choir with a performance in two weeks, and last night was one of the final rehearsals. I’d hoped to be back in time to put Ian to bed. I wasn’t.

Kelly said she tried to put Ian to bed three times. As they got nearer to his room, Ian started to cry and shake his head. “No! No!”

“Do you want to go back downstairs and wait for Daddy?”

“Yeah.” Ian can say “yeah” now.

Eventually he got himself so worked up that Kelly finally had to put him to bed. He cried himself to sleep.

All logical and justifiable reasons for my being gone aside, I still feel like the world’s biggest wad of gum stuck to the smelliest boot of the world’s biggest mean person walking through a pasture of the world’s most incontinent cows.