“Who you calling slow?”
The morning routine can get hectic in our household.
There’s breakfast to make, showers to take, the dog to walk and, of course, we have to get dressed.
For our nine-year-old son, the getting dressed part doesn’t come easy. Half dressed is about as much as he will do without prompting two, three or even four times from us parents. It’s the kind of prompting that drives us steaming mad with thoughts of using hot-iron rods to hurry him along.
And our son?
He’ll get dressed all in due time, in his time. After hearing our often detailed instructions about his chest of drawers, taking out different items and putting them on followed by his shoes, he’ll walk out of the kitchen. But he won’t turn in the direction of his room but to the piano for a quick play before flopping down on the sofa to flip through a book and then to pick up the cat, burp loudly and fart around aimlessly until we remind him of what he has to do: get dressed.
“Oh, yeah,” he says.
Then the rambling continues until we burst and my wife blasts out, “Get your shoes on and brush your teeth now!”
He stops what he is doing and looks up at her with a quizzical face and then in his dawdling speech says, “Hey, I can only do one thing at a time. I’m not elastic.”
And so our anger turns to a chuckle and then our resignation that we are going to get out the door late once again. But who really cares other than the institution of etiquette?
