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Children who plan ahead
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My daughter likes to plan ahead. Her birthday is in August, so she starts hinting for presents as soon as the last snow has melted. The best time to plan next year’s project is on the ride home from this year’s Science Fair. She starts Father’s Day presents in February, wishes for snow in July, and if anybody ever decides to invent time travel, by god, she is going to be ready. Isabella may be physically in the room, but her mind is perpetually elsewhere.
The problem with all her planning is that she often doesn’t see what is right in front of her. Discussing what her homework will be like in fourth grade is much more fun than doing the homework she has been assigned today. Isabella is a dreamer, not a doer, and the words ‘right now’ simply don’t enter into the equation. Trying to make her do anything fast is like swimming upstream; you’ll expend a lot of energy, but you never get anywhere.
Her little brother Mendel, on the other hand, experiences only the here and now. Tell him about cause and consequence, and he only sees the cause. “If you go to sleep on time,” I say, “I will let you watch the Bee Movie tomorrow.” It doesn’t work, he doesn’t want to go to sleep, he wants to watch his movie right now. Tomorrow may never come, he thinks, and so striking any kind of deal with him is out of the question. Promises about things that might happen in the future fall on deaf ears, and he simply doesn’t understand why his sister always talks about things that haven’t happened yet.
That Isabella doesn’t use her planning tendencies to her own benefit is evident when I find a word scribbled on the doorpost. “Jerk” it says in meticulous, miniature script. “Mendel did it,” she says, and tries to make a quick getaway.
Unfortunately for her, Mendel is four years old, and can’t write much more than his own name, and the word ‘Tree’. Also, the word is positioned at a height he can’t reach. Since I am fairly certain my husband isn’t the culprit (at least, I hope not) she is most definitely the one in trouble.
“What were you thinking,” I ask, “I wouldn’t find this? I don’t wipe the doorposts once a week? I wouldn’t immediately know it was you?”
She looks at me, and I can see her brains working at maximum speed, trying to come up with an answer.
“When I’m an adult, you’ll think it is cute,” she finally tells me, a smug look on her face.
I mutter a little more about her ‘never making it to adulthood’ if she keeps this up, but I have to admit she is right. Except, unlike her, I don’t like to live that far in the future.
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