With small children in the house my entire day has been broken down into tiny increments.
“Time Out, Emma. Three minutes.”
“One more minute Jack and it’s Nick’s turn with the motorcycle.”
“Nick, you can play in the fort for three more minutes and then it’s Emma’s turn.”
“Mommy! Can you help me put on my princess dress?!” “Sure honey, just a minute.”
There are also larger increments at play, but sometimes these activities drag out so long over the period of a day that you feel as if you could watch the minute hand make it’s way around the clock.Jack is at my house for 540 minutes a day. I’m in the kitchen for 120 minutes a day. My children are in time-out for 27 minutes per day. I pick up the floor for 90 minutes a day. A load of wash takes 19 minutes and the dryer takes 31. My dog can only handle 3 minutes outside before her fur spontaneously combusts. My cat will only allow approximately .5 minutes after your feet hit the floor in the morning before he begins to cry for food. Macaroni takes 7.5 minutes to cook. Spongebob runs in 11 minute increments with a small break in-between.
I don’t bother to wear a watch anymore because I’ve now got an innate sense of time. When I was a child I used to admire the fact that my father could look up at the sun and tell me what time is was within 10 minutes of accuracy. Now I think that he might have been having a little fun with his gullible child. He probably just knew that it was 10 after 1:00 because lunch had been over for half an hour, my brother and I had fought for the obligatory 10 minutes about who had to clean up, and we’d just spent 5 minutes in our rooms cooling off. Voila! 10 minutes past 1:00.
Perhaps if I could get this schedule down to a science I could begin to head off the trouble times before they began. Maybe if I separated the children at exactly 9:47 each morning, we would never have to have the “Nick pushed me down and Jack won’t play with me” whine and fuss fest that inevitably happens.
Well, would you look at the time? Only 292 minutes until dinner.
Then there are the inevitable sayings: “Bedtime is in 10 minutes,” which actually takes place 20 minutes later, or “We have to leave this house in 5 minutes,” which might happen with blessings and luck 15 minutes later. I’m supposed to drop the kids off at 8:30 in the morning, and I usually do… give or take 45 minutes.