This weekend marks a splendid occasion of wedding joys for a friend and his new lady friend, a lady who is now our friend but most certainly not our lady friend.

I just wanna make that clear.

Emily and I are both helping with this wedding, what with the renting of a tuxedo and the management of floral arrangements. I hope you can guess which one of us is doing which. And no, Emily isn’t wearing a tux and I’m not arranging flowers. That would be absurd, though I don’t look down on people who do such things.

That’s also not the point.

The point is that we have the opportunity for a kid free weekend. No more Handy Manny. No more colorful plastic toys. No more screaming, puppets on TV or doctor’s office visits for runny noses. The children are nestled, all snug in their beds… at Grandma’s house. This means that Emily and I can live the high life of parenthood without the parenting; a weekend filled with relaxation, a full nights sleep and the bounty of not having to handle someone else’s waste.

This was the scenario until about 4 hours ago.

Emily woke up and didn’t feel right. No, it wasn’t the missing sound of screaming or the lack of cheerios on the kitchen floor that made her uncomfortable. Something was up. I’m not going to go into detail, since HIPA regulations are quite clear. I will say, though, that the people at the Holland Hospital Urgent Care center are exceedingly kind, especially given our circumstance of being 2 hours from home and needing to get on with a friends wedding.

And that’s where we sat on Saturday morning. Kid free. The waiting room of the urgent care center.

While Handy Manny was on the clinic TV.

While little kids ran around and screamed. Probably Mad Cow disease.

While we waited to see a medical professional, just like when the kids have a cough, sneeze or wheeze.

And so on.

You see the irony, right? We get this choice opportunity to get away, celebrate the marriage of great friends and give our kids a break from us? And there we are — 2 hours away from home — doing the EXACT same thing we always do. Ha! Right?

Right?