Running on Four-Year-Old Time

Photo credit: Photo by Film Colourist

I admit, I'm not a person prone to get places in a timely manner. Fashionably or unfashionably, I'm always late. And for the last two days in a row, it has been fashion that held us up in getting to preschool: four-year-old fashion, that is.

Preschool is actually something I like and want to be on time, even early for. You see, I can drop my daughter off early with no penalty or extra charge, but if I pick her up late, I pay a dollar a minute. And the more time she is at preschool, the more time I have to blog. The whole system is set up to reward me for getting her to school early-to-on-timeish. And yet. And yet...

My daughter wakes up one and a half hours before we need to leave for school. All she needs to do in those one and a half hours is eat something and get her clothes on. All I need to do in those one and a half hours is assist and facilitate the process of eating and dressing. After all, I've been up some time already and am dressed and fed and ready to go.

For one and a half hours, she doesn't want to eat. I offer up food, she's not hungry. She pushes it away, turns her nose up at it, keeps on with the important business of drawing on the sofa or chasing the cat. I don't make her eat. I want her to listen to her body. If she chooses to skip breakfast, so be it. I made the food available. The problem would arise when she suddenly found herself wanting to sit down to eat the minute I say, "Time to go." Then I'd mutter and fume and rush to find some easy breakfast she could eat in the car. But I'm smarter than a four-year-old, especially a four-year-old who can't tell time. I started saying "time to go" a half an hour before it was actually drop-dead time to be out the door. Ha! Problem solved. And that leaves us an hour to get dressed.

Theoretically, an hour is plenty of time to get dressed, unless you're four; clothes have this tendency to come off, to get smeared with jelly, to disappear in favor of princess dresses or Jedi robes, to wind up on the long suffering cat. A lot of things can happen clothes. You just never know. So dressing has to be done (or redone) close to departure time too. And yesterday there was a last minute sock problem.

"My socks are too tight! My feet grew!"

"Ok, they're a little tight, but you wore them yesterday. We'll go to the store after school."

"No! I'm too big I need new socks now!"

"Oo, how about if you wear your shoes without socks! It's spring now. No socks necessary!"

"Nooooo! I need socks! Let's go to the store now!"

Fine. We'll wear slippers and make a quick stop at Target; we'll only be a few minutes late. Off we go, and $6.50 later, at about the time we are supposed to already have arrived at school, we are on our way there with a bag of 10 pairs of new, larger socks. One pair, the blue ones, are on her feet, the remaining nine pairs are in her backpack in the plastic zip close bag they came in, because she refuses to be parted from them.

When her brother comes home from school, she shows him the bag of socks and empties it on the floor. When Daddy comes home from work she shouts, "I got new socks" and throws them over her head. Nine pairs of new socks rain down on the living room floor.

At bedtime, we clean up: dirty blue socks in the washer, nine pairs cleanish socks with the clean laundry, one zip bag in the trash, trash taken out. ("You're sure you don't want the sock bag anymore?" I ask. "No, I'm all done with it," she confirms.)

This morning, dressing goes smoothly at first, because I proposed her favorite shirt. Shirt and pants go happily on, but then we arrive at socks.

"Let's put on your new socks!"

"Where's the bag?"

"It's gone. You told me last night you were done with it, so we put it in the trash."

"Nooooo!!" She screams as if I've thrown away the one thing that gives her life meaning and dissolves into a puddle on the floor. She gets up, peers into the trash can and falls down again in despair.

"We could put them in a different bag," I say, offering up a Ziploc.

"Noooo!" She wails from the floor. After a few minutes, she pulls herself together and says, pointing to the Ziploc, "I think we can use that bag."

Now the socks are happily ensconced in a new bag. "I want to wear the blue ones," she says. Of course! $6.50 for one pair of blue socks, which come with a bonus playset of 9 pairs of other non-blue socks and a plastic bag. That's totally what I was going for.

"The blue socks are in the wash. You'll have to pick a different pair." I explain, knowing I have just given another devastating and completely unsatisfactory answer.

"Noooo! I want the blue ones!" she shrieks.

Several minutes later, she pulls herself together once more and declares that the purple socks will be ok. Oh, and also the fuchsia and the pink. She puts all three pairs on: first the purple, then the fuchsia, then the pink. Then her shoes. "They're too tight!!" (Go figure.) She takes off the pink and then the fuchsia, leaving the purple, which she no longer likes. So, she takes those off too and then puts the fuchsia back on, topped with the shoes.

Having, finally, clad her feet to her satisfaction, we are ready to go. Five minutes late. Because it took 20 minutes to put on socks and shoes. And I only budgeted 15. Silly me. At least we were fashionably late.