Toast

Like, I suspect, most kids, my daughter's idea of how long it will take her to get out of bed is seriously out of whack. She'll say, sleepily, that she'll be out in three minutes, and we know that means that we'll need to go call her again in ten. This tendency runs in the family -- we have the concept of 'mom minutes', as in when my wife says she'll be up in ten minutes, and we'll ask 'Is that ten real minutes, or ten Mom Minutes?', which is more like twenty, or more. It's one of the ways my wife and I differ -- I tend to be a bug about time; if I say I'll do something at a given time, I am ready. (Well, usually.) But my wife does try, which I appreciate. And even if she takes longer than she says she will, she doesn't take an arbitrary amount -- on time today, two hours late tomorrow. She'll be working towards completion, and rarely adds things in along the way. She told me once that one of her sisters, comparing her to another sister, said that while both of them were rarely ready when they said they would be, my wife, when she said she was ready, really was -- unlike the other sister, who 'just has to go balance my checkbook and paint the bathroom'.

This morning, my daughter asked for just a slice of toast for breakfast. When she stumbled out fifteen minutes after she said she'd be out, I was eating a slice of toast. I just looked at her and said " I didn't want the toast to get cold, so I ate it. " She looked at me. You made two, I'm sure you did.

Which, of course, I had.