STEPHEN LEWIS, Post Columnist
Posted: Sunday, May 31, 2009 7:18 am

So the wife travels out of town last week and I figure I’ve got the place to myself so I’ll live it up. The plan is to lay around and watch baseball, Seinfeld episodes I’ve DVRed, and lay in the recliner until I aggravate the recliner sores I developed last time she went out of town. There was one small catch this time however. This time my daughter was not traveling with her, and I would be responsible for taking care of her.

Now I’m figuring this is no big deal since she is 8 years old. By that time my boys were pretty much on their own, and I only saw them at holidays or occasionally when they came downstairs for something to eat. So at worst I’m probably going to have to make a couple of meals for her and drop her off at school each morning. A couple of my wife’s co-workers volunteered to help out while she was gone but I told her to let them know I’m quite capable of taking care of an 8-year-old girl for two days by myself. I’ve got four college degrees, a certificate for excellence in a hot dog eating contest, and I can juggle three tennis balls while jumping on a pogo stick. I can handle an 8-year-old.

The first morning was a little more difficult than I had planned. I had hoped an 8-year-old could pick out her own clothes but that’s not the case in our house. When my boys were younger, any shirt with a monster truck or Pokemon on it was good. A pair of shorts and the outfit was complete. With a girl there are rules for what type of shirt can be worn with certain bottoms. And color matters too. Apparently you can’t put an orange top with a red skirt. Heck, when I was a kid I had four pair of Toughskins pants. One light blue pair, a red pair, a green pair and a dark blue pair. My favorite ensemble was the red pants and an orange shirt. I looked like a three and a half foot fire hydrant but I thought I looked great. My daughter was not quite as amused when I picked a similar fire hydrant outfit for her.

Since the two days my wife was out of town were school days I was also responsible for making lunches for princess Caroline. The wife offered to make these ahead of time but I assured her I could put together two days of sack lunches. She said fine but that she would leave a detailed list of instructions so I would get it right. Get it right? It’s a ham sandwich. Gimme a break!

Suffice it to say the list of instructions she left was somewhere in length between the rules for the board game Risk and the Magna Carta. I decided I didn’t need to read multiple pages on how to make a sack lunch. I did look at the list of what Caroline likes in her lunch and prepared those in my own special way. Big mistake.

Who knew that a sandwich cut in half across the middle making two rectangles does not taste the same as a sandwich cut diagonally? Now I do. I also had no clue that if you do not get the marshmallow to M&Ms to Cheez-It crackers ratio exactly right, then her snack mix is inedible. By this time I’m checking under her mattress to see if there is a pea that’s causing her to wake up in the middle of the night.

Due to the foulup in lunch I was forced to swing by McDonald’s to pick up dinner for my starving daughter. Go figure. I can’t pack an edible lunch for my own daughter but a clown who has a Hamburgular and giant purple blob as friends can. I only had to go through the line three times till we got a Happy Meal toy she doesn’t have yet. And of course she broke it on the way home.

Never has a husband, who’s been married longer than six months, been so happy to see his wife return home. After two days of catering to princess Caroline I’m ready for the wife to take back over. For the life of me I don’t know where Caroline gets this side of her personality from. Anyway, it’s over and the wife is bringing me a sandwich now so I’ve got to wrap this up. It’s my favorite: ham and Swiss with mayo and mustard. Mmmmm...mmmm. “Aww baby, this ain’t right! You know I like the mustard on the bottom!”