Countdown

"Fourteen days to go!"

Sometimes I regret teaching her to count. 

"We're on day eleven, and twenty five takeaway eleven is fourteen, so there's fourteen days to go!"

The corners of my mouth twitch in pride at the maths. But I can't waste time here beaming, we're late, dammit. 

"Shoes! Where are your shoes?!"

"Upstairs?"

It's the same thing every damn day, but for the life of them they can't seem to figure out that we repeat the same actions over and over and over again, and the fact that they need to wear shoes outside seems to come as a complete surprise. 

I check my watch, and do some mental maths of my own: twelve minutes from school to station, two minutes saying goodbye at the gate, nine minutes from nursery to school, two minutes at nursery drop-off, two minutes from door to nursery, twenty nine minutes in total, meaning I have… thirty seconds to get them out of the door.

There's an old Michael McIntyre routine about the difficulty of leaving your house as a parent, but it completely misses out the part about kids having zero sense of a deadline. 

My adult life is full of deadlines. Pressure to do this by then or else that. Even advent is a deadline. Opening those doors as a kid is like a torturous wait, delaying the gratification of Christmas for an eternity, forcing you to be aware of how slowly time moves forward. But for me it's a daily reminder of how much there is to do and how little time is left. I’ve barely started Christmas shopping.

"Where's your jumper?"

I'm hunting through cupboards, searching backs of chairs, turning over cushions in haste.

"You had it yesterday, what did you do with it?"

She shrugs. She has no idea. She never has any idea. 

She wanders off to fiddle with something as I'm now checking cupboards I've already checked in case it's magically materialised in the last ten seconds. Meanwhile I'm running through excuses in my head, wondering if I can blame Southern Rail again, and resisting the urge to capitulate and call upstairs. 

Finally a brainwave: it's in her fucking bag after she'd shoved it in there yesterday. 

Right! We're good to go! Out the door!

“But I need the toilet”

What?! 

I consider making them hold it until they’re safely through the gates and officially Not My Responsibility for eight hours but I check my watch and with the mental image of the train I was aiming for leaving the station without me, decide to relax, and breathe.

So I let them go, and lean against the radiator by the front door.

My wife chooses that moment to walk past to the home office set-up.

“You’re very calm this morning”

“Just missed a train”

“Ah”

Finally, wearily, they’re ready, and I corral them through the door like I'm shoving skydivers out a helicopter over a warzone, and I can't help but be a little bit proud of my achievements this morning. 

I pull the door behind me and watch them skip up the road, her leading him by the hand and laughing as they go, oblivious to the anguish they’ve just caused.

They do this every day and somehow manage to discover a new way to make it fun each time. 

Time feels slow as a kid because you're constantly making new memories and new neural pathways. But for me it's speeding up so fast. It's everything I can do to slow it down. But then she goes and pulls a stunt like mentally calculating the days left to Christmas and it hits me again just how quick they're changing and how little time we actually spend as children. It's a ridiculously short part of your life. I should spend less of it fretting about trains.

Fourteen days to go.

I resolve to savour every minute.