You, Me, and those three. [open]

[Charlie Parker]

6:00 alarm goes off, get ready for the day. 6:30 make breakfast for everyone. 6:45 Chuck gets up. 7:00 Melody gets up. 7:15 Jamie gets up. 7:30 breakfast. 7:45 leave the house. 8:00 drop boys off at school. 8:15 drop Melody off at daycare. 8:30 clock in. 3:00 clock out. 3:15 pick up boys from school. 3:30 pick up Melody from daycare. 4:00 babysitter arrives. 4:30 leave the house. 5:00 clock back in. Midnight, clock out. 12:30 get home, sleep for 5.5 hours. 6:00 repeat. Such was the schedule for an overworked policeman trying to raise three children on his own. Of course, he only worked half days on Saturdays and had Sundays off most of the time, but when you lived on five and a half hours of sleep per night, it could really take a toll on you, especially when you weren't even 30 yet and this was the life you lived.

There were days when Charlie had to wonder "what if?" What if he hadn't ever allowed himself to get involved with Hayley? Her drug and alcohol problems had been enough to nearly drive him insane, and when he finally broke things off with her, she just disappeared and left him with her son and their eight month old baby girl. What if he hadn't ever met Peyton? Losing her so soon after they had met had nearly killed him, and if it weren't for her making him promise to take care of her son after she died, who knows what he might have done? What if he had never gone to New York instead of just staying in Pinewood where most of the time all he did all day was issue tickets for illegal parking and occasionally arrest someone for drug use? There were so many what ifs in his life. But then when he really thought about it, he loved those three kids... even if Chuck did have excessive amount of energy, and Jamie was so incredibly closed off that he sometimes wondered if the kid was alright, and Melody was a lot of work at times, and to be honest, he really wouldn't trade any of them for the world.

Being that today was Saturday, he only had a half day of work. On this particular day, his babysitter was out of town, so he had bribed Anthony into taking the kids for the first half of the day for him. It was never all that difficult to guilt Anthony into doing things, and he didn't mind taking the kids all that much... he could always talk Chuck into doing things for him, like cleaning tack or cleaning stalls. Jamie, though, could never be talked into doing things. He was a very independent kid, and he was usually fine off by himself doing whatever he pleased. Melody was always easy, though she was a bit too young to do anything just yet, but she usually just followed Anthony around babbling on about this or that and always stayed out of the way of the horses. So he took them for the morning until noon when Charlie got off work, at which point he brought them down to the station and dropped them off with him.

After clocking out, he scooped Melody up and the four of them walked over to the park which was just a block away. It didn't take long for Jamie and chuck to scurry off to go play football, and Melody found a patch of flowers that she could pick, so that left Charlie to sit on a bench a short distance away, keeping his eye on the three of them. Anyone would have to be crazy to cause any trouble involving Charlie's kids. He was very protective of his family, and considering that he was a cop, he was completely capable of arresting someone if they tried anything... or he could just shoot them and call it good. The odds of anyone doing anything while a guy in the policeman's uniform was sitting right there were highly unlikely. This was just the kind of day that Charlie needed... one where he could relax and just not do anything. No one really knew what being a single parent was until they tried it, and Charlie was getting a crash course with three kids all at once.