anxious
smallclanger wriggled lots when they tried to attach the CTG, so the heartbeat trace looks like a mountain range. They told me I wouldn't be allowed to stay overnight, so that's one decision I didn't need to make.At about 8pm a midwife came to administer prostaglandin. The monitor was re-attached. Same as usual. We read for a bit and played cards for a bit. As of two hours later there were still no externally visible effects. We decided it was time for me to leave after they attached the monitor again (visiting hours are supposed to finish at 9, after all).
So I left with strict instructions to return at 8am (yawn) - if anything happens earlier than that then I will of course get a phone call.
Having been instructed to go to bed without so much as making a LJ entry (oops!) I hope J realises I won't have done any more tidying (well there's still tomorrow night I suppose). The living room is in a state of what I might call `latent tidyness': the tidyness is there - it's just very well hidden. :-)
Unfortunately the lab administrator (M) has thrown a spanner in the works. While my immediate boss (and my colleagues) seemed quite understanding and happy for me to be out of the lab, it seems that M has just realised I haven't been there for a while and has lots of University regulations to fulfil. I feel guilty at not actually having gone into work for the last 2 weeks (and though I've tried my best to work from home I've had rather a lot of distractions, not least from J wanting to be taken to the shops or wanting shelves put up) but I'd have felt even more guilty at leaving J all on her own every day - well, what would you do?
The timing of this could have been better. :-( My nice boss C emailed me this morning saying that M had asked him how I intended to classify my time off. Apparently before working from home I'm supposed to get permission from the head of department, and I didn't because, well, things happened unexpectedly and anyway I didn't know I had to. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of sick or compassionate leave which can be applied [on looking at the University's personnel information, it's left up to the department's discretion but it recommends only a couple of days in order to arrange someone else to look after the sick person, and it also gives strict instructions not to leave work without arranging this first] and I have only 1.5 weeks of annual leave left until October.
So I emailed C with the current situation and asked him to make the next round of negotiations with M. I also asked if it was possible to get the head of department's permission for me to have worked at home the last couple of weeks, but that seems to have gone ignored (by which I take it the University regulations require this to be arranged in advance and M doesn't want to be flexible about it).
The reply came that (a) M is willing to call it quits if I write off my remaining annual leave and go back to work next Monday, and (b) M says I don't get any paid paternal leave. So I've just been through the online guidelines for University staff to refute (b) and fired off a note to point it out (according to J, whom I trust implicitly, it's my legal entitlement to get two weeks' paid paternity leave so M is dead wrong on this issue even if I couldn't find it in the notes, which in fact I did). For the moment I've ignored (a), because it depends on the result of (b). (I just hope that M, on finding out that he was wrong about (b), doesn't suddenly become stricter about (a). I really can't afford to take any unpaid leave right now, unless they are going to pay me very handsomely for my help with the examination database.)
So that's that. I should have been in bed an hour ago, and I'm off to set my alarm clock for some unearthly time in the morning, presupposing they won't ring me in the middle of the night.