6/7/12

A Brief History of Time

Z got a watch for her birthday from my parents. It's analog, which was not her preference, and at first she worried that it would be too difficult to figure out.

Now, of course, there's no stopping her.

Unfortunately, her ability and interest in telling time means that she is constantly monitoring, and complaining about, the discrepancies between clocks in our house.

I keep telling her it's simply not possible to make all clocks display exactly the same time. She is unimpressed with my logic.

"Is there a real time? A time that is true?"  she asked.

I showed her time.gov and after immediately setting her watch for the RIGHT time, she watched it, rapt.

"There goes another second! And another! AND ANOTHER!"

"Yep. Time does that; it goes on and on and on."

"Isn't is amazing?!?!?!"

"Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is."

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E has zero concept of time. Every single night at bedtime, she asks if it's bedtime or nap time. The same thing happens at nap/quiet time. She has no concept of how long a minute is when I tell her she needs to wait a minute. She doesn't even grasp the basic concepts of past, present and future, though she clearly likes the sound of "yesterday".

If you ask her when something happened or will happen, she has three typical responses:

"I no know."

"Yesterdtoday"

And, my personal favorite, "Yesterlater."

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26 days, 2 hours and 33 minutes ago, I submitted an essay I wrote to several publications.

I have heard from exactly none of them.

Time. Marches. On.


4 comments:

LA and BD said...

When I was in college I babysat a little boy who was around E's age, and he always called yesterday "lasterday". SO CUTE!

Kathi D. said...

I am regretting that Mira is learning to tell time. She now can tell me it isn't her bedtime when I try to sneak her into bed early... Sigh!

Congrats on submitting the essays! Good luck!

twisterfish said...

Time can be such a friend or enemy... depending on the situation.

This post reminded me that my youngest used to say "yesternight" and now doesn't any longer. Sigh. I loved that and miss it.

Good luck on your submission. I hope you hear back soon. (I'm like a kid when trying to wait patiently for something, and I totally understand why they'll continually ask "how about now?" over and over again.)

Michelle said...

Peanut learned the phrase "any minute now" and it is making me batty. Every half hour on our 13 hour drive home from vacation she asked if we were going to be home "any minute now." I wanted to weep.

Yeah for getting the courage up to submit the essays!

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