Ready to go? You’ve got to be kidding!
Families today are on the go — or would be if they could only get ready.
The time it takes a family to prepare to go anywhere increases with each additional child. They are too busy fighting over the bathroom.
And I don’t mean two kids doubles the time needed. We’re talking the same scale that banks use on your mortgage — compounded daily interest. Two kids takes three times as long; three kids takes six times as much time; four offspring equals 12 times the time you’ll be twiddling your thumbs, and so on.
This is why you hardly see large families anymore. By the time Mom finishes scrubbing the last kid, the first is riding a muddy dog through the neighbor’s hedge.
Parents usually resort to just trapping the dog and taking it. It’s less trouble and the dog stays cleaner than the kid.
This scientifically proven fact escapes couples without kids. While they are scurrying around the house packing for a picnic — wrapping plasticware in napkins color coordinated with table cloth, cooler and their matching shirts — they fantasize that with two or three manicured children to graciously handle these errands, they could be ready so much sooner, and even attend to more important things, like curling their hair and flossing their teeth.
To them, this makes sense. It’s a common hallucination caused early in life by doing too many story problems in math class:
“If it takes Mr. and Mrs. Green an hour and 45 minutes to get everything ready for a picnic by themselves, how long could they sleep in in the morning if their perfectly cultivated and gracious children, Sally, Billy and Fred, split the duties with them?’’
It is, of course, a trick question. Children generally aren’t cultivated, though they do plow through the dirt a lot. And it’s not a division problem, it’s multiplication.
By using special “The Family Prepares to Go Nowhere Tables,” which factors in X and Y chromosomes, one can easily figure that with Billy, Sally and Fred’s help, the family must start getting ready for an August picnic in January.
The family on the go also must be aware of The Last Kid Out the Door Theorem: If a family actually manages to get out of the house, the last kid will forget to close the door.
Invariably, according to this theorem tested by 857 million parents nationally, the family will return to find the door wide open, flapping in the wind, tapping out in Morse code, “Nobody home. Help yourself to our silverware. You’ll have to wash it first.”
A final point — during the getting ready process, it is the husband’s duty, as mandated by Congress, to sit in the car and honk the horn for 20 straight minutes until everyone crawls out of bed.
Then he must continue honking the horn while the wife fixes the food, corrals, slops and washes the kids, builds the picnic table and things like that.
This was my dad’s method of helping. Years later, my own personal wife told me that if I EVER sat in the car and honked, I would live to regret it — if I lived at all — because she’d…
She never finished that sentence. And I was never brave enough to tap the horn to find out.
I do know that things seem to go faster if the dad honks instead of helps.
Should the husband actually attempt to assist in the getting ready process, the family loses all chances of going anywhere.
This is because the wife tends to become too distracted with admiration as her husband takes charge, barking out such helpful leadership as:
“Honey, where do we keep the combs?”
“Sweetheart, where do we keep the kids?”
“Oh, was I supposed to put lunch meat on those sandwiches? By the way, where do we keep the bread?”
“How many kids do we have again? I think there’s an extra one banging on the bathroom door. And that’s definitely the neighbor’s dog.”
So, with your science on straight, you may begin getting ready for a summer picnic. Start now. July of 2025 is only 11 months away.
Honk at Burt at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.