Outta time

When Ben started kindergarten, our lives were suddenly on a more rigid schedule. Daycare didn't really care if we were five or ten minutes later than usual, but when you have a humorless schoolbus driver determining whether your child avoids a tardy, you start to watch the minutes a bit more carefully. 8:25? Plenty of time. 8:26? Getting close - might want to get things moving toward the door. 8:27? OH MY GOD WE NEED TO RUN NOW!

But Ben is a notorious dawdler. No matter how routine the practice, he needs to be reminded three times (usually at increasing volume and level of hysteria) before he'll take action. In order to cope with this habit, we bought an egg timer. Both our oven and microwave have built-in timers, but like most things digital, they lack a certain quality of their old-fashioned counterparts: namely, the ominous tick-tick-ticking and metallic staccato of the bell. Much in the way that the tell-tale heart drove its proprietor to madness, we hoped the egg timer would drive Ben to get dressed.

Ben received the egg timer with amused suspicion at first. We set it to five minutes, and Ben beat the buzzer by about four. Huzzah, we said to ourselves. Within days, however, Ben came to despise the egg timer. He never failed to get dressed with more than enough time left over, but I think the timer's cheap construction - which led to its occasionally failing to ring the bell when it reached the zero - left a sense of the unresolved. Ben came to see the ticking plastic pear as his nemesis, and I could see him wanting to stash it under the floorboards.

The timer did work, though. After a week we didn't even need it. If he took too long to get dressed, the mere threat of pulling out the timer got him moving.

Like those phrases you never realize you say until your child says them back to you, though, parental tactics can come back to haunt you. Kids notice everything, and whenever they see an opportunity to use something against its creator, they will. This morning, for instance, I was apparently taking too long to make waffles for breakfast, so Ben said:

"Daddy, I'm going to get the timer, and if you're not done by the time it goes off I'm going to be starving!"