�And you know this because�?� Donna prompted.
�Hey, I�ve been standing here since ten in the morning,� Josh complained. The President had told him that he needed to wait outside the door to the Situation Room until a decision had been made. �Tell me about the kid. Is she a devil child with sticky hands and cookie crumbs on her face?�
�Seriously, you need to stay far, far away from any and all children, Josh,� Donna said. Josh knew she was rolling her eyes. �Meredith is great. She�s incredibly intelligent for her age, very well behaved, and she can bring the verbal almost as well as Sam can. We didn�t get to talk much, though, �cause she fell asleep in the car, but I�m gonna stick around here for a while and make sure that she gets settled in.�
Josh smiled. He knew that Donna had been determined to make this situation as easy for Sam and Meredith as possible. He wanted to do that, too, but he was so hopeless at non-political things that he had decided that helping with the furniture and picking up some of the slack for Sam at work was the extent of how he would help with the Meredith situation. �Good. Make sure Sam gets some sleep. Whenever he has to face his family he ends up getting all maudlin if he doesn�t get some quality sleep after it�s over.�
�He�s already in bed. So is Meredith. I�m just about to run to the store because I realized that, with all the stuff we were doing to make that office become Meredith�s bedroom we didn�t stock the fridge and all Sam had in there were the leftovers from when I came over the night this all started,� Donna said. �I�m sure he�d appreciate it if you called him in a few hours to find out how everything�s going,� she added.
�I was going to wait until morning, let him get some more sleep, but if you think he�ll be up in a few hours I�ll check in,� Josh said. �Assuming I haven�t gone insane from standing in this damn hallway,� he muttered causing Donna to laugh softly and comment on how it wouldn't take much for him to go insane.
After wrapping up his conversation with Donna, Josh went back to waiting for the President to either wrap up what he was doing or give him further directions. He had been standing there for so long that he had missed lunch�something his doctor had said in no uncertain terms was a �no-no��and, as much as he hated to admit it, he was feeling the lapse in his new routine. Skipping meals, living on coffee�which he didn�t have�and not exercising were all things of the past for Josh Lyman. He went to the gym at least twice a week, ate three meals a day at times that were as regular as he could possibly make them, and, though he hated to do it, he had even cut down on his caffeine intake. His doctor, Donna, and Mrs. Bartlet�not to mention his mother�had been after him for years to do all these things, but he had blown them all off until his cousin, Timothy, who was two years younger than he was�with a much less stressful job�had suffered a massive heart attack that led back to too much stress, a crappy diet, no exercise, and too much caffeine. At first Josh had thought that he would be fine because, obviously he handled everything better than Tim did, but then he realized that Tim didn�t have the pre-existing heart condition�he refused to call it what it was which was internal scarring of the heart muscle from a bullet�and combined with his high stress job and tendency to hold the important things in, Josh had finally caved to his doctor�s orders.