Are you always hurrying your little ones along? Wondertime has a great article on the tension between hurried adults and lollygagging kids. "When it comes to time, children and adults are like different species thrown together in a cruel zoological experiment: We hurry exhaustedly to and fro while our kids dawdle around with boundless energy," they write.
The sight of little kids being hurried down the subway steps during rush hour is certainly familiar to us. But we also see our fair share of parents quietly waiting beside them while their kids explore on our neighborhood street.
What we want to know: how do you slow things down at home? What rituals do you include in your down time to stop and savor the moment?
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Comments (3)
1. We have our sitter come to our home. Lordy, it's expensive, and we can only just afford it, but it means our toddler -- a born dawdler if ever there was one -- doesn't have to rush through his breakfast and morning ablutions. Most mornings he's still eating breakfast in his PJs while we leave the house.
2. We always eat dinner together at the table, and nobody gets up till the last person is finished. Given that Sam is the sloooowest eater in the world, this usually means an hour of unhurried family time.
3. Most evenings, we go for a walk after dinner, and we let Sam guide us, which is a lot of fun.
4. We make sure not to overschedule our weekends. One day is reserved for "family day", where we don't make plans with anyone else, nor do we plan any activities in advance. We decide in the moment what we feel like doing, and sometimes that means nothing but noodling around the house in our pyjamas for half the day.
All that aside, my husband and I are naturally pokey ourselves, so it's not like this is much of a sea change in our usual habits. And to take the opposite position, I have friends who are total Type As -- with kids to match -- and they all seem to have a blast rushing around. I think it all depends on how much your kids' personalities mesh with your own, and then making concessions wherever there are differences.
I work very hard to not say "Hurry up" or "We're late!" or any variations of such. I know that my 2 year old has no clue what those words mean and I don't want her to feel like I'm rushing the first time we get to see each other in the morning.
edie brickell wrote a nice song about this from a summer or two ago....called "Rush Around" sometimes it makes me stop and think when i start the frantic "let's go" diatribe. with 4 kids who are slow as molasses, and places to go and things to do, i find the best solution is to prepare ahead of time, and not expect to be on time very often. (my mantra is "just breathe")