Just Call Me "Mrs. Fix-It"

You know George Clooney's character in Michael Clayton? He worked for a big, prestigious law firm as a "fixer," hired to handle difficult situations on behalf of the firm's clients. Well, it just dawned on me that I am my family's "fixer." Granted, I'm not covering up murders caused by toxic argochemicals, but if there's a scheduling conflict between soccer and a birthday party or if we need to find an afterhours clinic that accepts our particular health care insurance card while someone is puking their guts out on the living room carpet at 2am, leave it to mom to work it all out.

My realization came about 45 minutes ago when I solved the Crisis Of The Day involving locating a notary to witness our home re-finance documents (btw - call your mortgage company asap! rates are crazy low). Anyway, the issue really was scheduling. Hubby is at work all day, as am I - waaaay across town (in another state, in fact. Or district, as it were). The problem is that almost every single notary operates only during business hours and it was going to be a task for both of us to get to a notary before 5pm. Complicating matters is the fact that Hubby's car starter died yesterday and so we are down to one car. So. This morning he took my car (which the nanny usually uses to drop the girls to school), dropped Chatterbox to school, me to the subway and then he drove to work. We tried to do the notary before work, but the banks didn't open until 9am and I had an 11am meeting, blah, blah, blah.

To make a long (and boring) story short, I was in a meeting all morning and so Hubby was the one trying to resolve the notary situation. He must have called me nine times (actually, he really did call 9 times - I just counted on my caller ID) trying to come up with a plan. And his plans were giving me a headache. For example, he suggested we both take the subway in the middle of the day and meet up at an inconvenient and hard-to-find notary location and then both take the train back to work. Then he would take my car to pick up Chatterbox, drop her at home with the nanny, Giggles and L'il Buddy, and then drive back to work. I would then take the train to the stop close to home where he would then drive to to pick me up and then we would drive home. Huh??? Didn't you get a headache just reading that? And that was just one iteration of his plan.

So after call #9, I couldn't take it anymore and decided to stop the madness. First, I called Chatterbox's school and asked if she could please stay in aftercare today. No problem. Second, I googled notaries close to the subway stop near my house and called and confirmed that one would be there this afternoon. Done. Then, I called Hubby and said: "Ok, here is what we are going to do. We are going to meet at the subway stop close to home at 4pm. You will drive my car there and pick me up. We will go to the notary and take care of the docs. Then we will pick up Chatterbox and go home for the day. Ok?" "OK!!" he says enthusiastically. Sheesh.

Tune in tomorrow for another episode of "Mom Saves the Day: And It's Not Rocket Science!"