Someone recently told me that children don’t really develop a strong sense of time until they are eight years old. If this is the case, then I really look forward to the Daughter’s next birthday.
As the person who gets her ready for school almost every morning, I can say that there is no correlation between what time she gets up and when she goes out the door for school. There have been mornings that I have to, almost literally, drag her out of bed, but then she becomes more alert and gets to school in plenty of time. There are other mornings she wakes early, yet we are rushing to get there before the late bell; in the latter case, it also imperils me catching my second bus of the morning and getting to work on time.
Some of the time issues involve play. But the vast bulk of it is her reading something. She reads everything – books, comic books, cereal boxes. And I realize that it is some sort of cosmic payback because I was THE SAME WAY.
When I was a child, I read the newspaper. I read the information on the back of my baseball cards. And I was fascinated by cereal boxes, specifically the various B vitamins and how some of them, such as niacin and riboflavin, actually got their own names, rather than a mere alphanumeric designation. So I was often late to things. I don’t think the Daughter’s quite at that point – YET – but I fear it’s coming because it’s probably genetic.
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Time – Pozo Seco Singers