This column, properly read (with a nice cup of Earl Grey and a pumpkin muffin) should take just a shade under five minutes to read.
This, coincidently, is the exact amount of time it takes my two children and me to walk the ten foot distance between the back door of my house and the car when it is raining.
In good weather this trip takes about twenty seconds.
There seems to be a rule in my house that the amount of time something will take (like getting the kiddos off to school or to a doctor’s appointment) is exactly two more minutes than you actually have available to you.
It all starts with shoes and socks.
If you think it’s difficult to keep a pair of socks together or keep track of both of your shoes as an adult, it is infinitely more difficult when those items are one third the size of yours.
I don’t believe in much by way of superstition or make believe, (the Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause etc.) but I believe in the Sock Gnomes.
These little pranksters sneak into your laundry and take one sock from every pair you have and permanently remove them from your home. I can only assume they flush them down the toilette, because on these same days I cannot find socks or shoes for my girls there is inevitably a backed up commode somewhere in the house flooding water at the exact moment you need to leave.
Sock Gnomes. There is no other explanation.
When it is raining torrentially (like last Friday’s monsoon like conditions) there is a simple mathematical formula that the girls like to use to determine how long it will take them to cover the short distance between the screen door and the open door of our family mini van "Mrs. Pettigrew". (The van is like a kindly old English nanny, she takes care of us always)
That formula is, as far as I can tell: the amount of rainfall per minute, plus the time we have left to make it to our destination, minus whatever stuffed animals and other assorted toys they can carry, divided by the earth’s exact distance from the sun that moment.
I should have realized long ago what was happening when I spied both girls by the door furiously punching numbers into their calculators and discussing something urgently in hushed tones to each other while looking over at me and making delta force style hand gestures about some upcoming scheme.
There is a typical, very human reaction to being hit with a wall of rain when stepping out your door in the morning, and that is to run like the dickens to get where you need to go.
But if you are a small, your first reaction to weather of this kind is to freeze up solid. No motion. No breathing. Nothing.
There is no amount of coaxing, cajoling, entreating or encouraging that can get a child to move in these situations. Dora The Explorer herself could be waving from inside the van, holding a plate of smores and lollipops and still that child will not move unless there is an adult hand holding theirs, urging them (okay, pulling) them on.
Once that child has finally gotten moving she or he will inevitably discover a few mud puddles that they will want to examine closely or stomp through.
These are both, of course, very time consuming activities.
I wish there was three more hours in every day for all the things that my girls want to look at more closely. "Dad, look! Wildflowers! Mom, stop the car, there’s an Elmo poster in that window. Dad! Doggies!"
Once you have gotten your adorable child (looking picturesque in her yellow duckie rain jacket) to the van there is still the task of buckling them in their seats, which involves standing just outside the vehicle, with rain pouring down the back of your neck directly into your underwear.
All this activity has taken exactly three and a half minutes, and as you settle into the driver’s seat, soaking wet, you marvel to yourself that you somehow shaved a minute and a half off the time it normally it takes to make it to the car in these conditions.
That is when you will look back at your smiling children and see that one of them has only one shoe on.
Oh, and the car keys are still somewhere inside. (Or with your spouse, who left the house in the other car an hour ago)
It’s okay you smile and tell yourself, you still have a minute and a half left.
