Going somewhere? Don't kid yourself
BURTON W. COLE, Editor
By Burton W. Cole
March begins this week, and you families with quiver full of quivering kidlings know what the means — you’re already late getting ready for that Fourth of July picnic.
Families today are on the go — or they would be if they could only get ready.
The time it takes a family to prepare to go anywhere with each additional child increases geometrically. Or possibly geologically. Every new bundle of joy multiplies the mountains that have to be moved to go anywhere.
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 instead. The dog’s less trouble and stays cleaner.
If you see a couple out with just a dog, there probably are 10 to 12 kids at home fighting over the bathroom.
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 tablecloth, cooler and their matching shirts — they fantasize that with two or three manicured children to graciously handle these errands, they could attend to more important things, like trimming their toenails 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 the picnic in January.
The family on the go also must be aware of The Last Kid Out the Door Theorem: If a family manages to actually get out of the house — and I speak hypothetically, here — the last kid out 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 silver. It’s in the sink under the paper plates and bread wrappers.”
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 other such “womanly” duties like that.
Things go faster this way.
Should the husband attempt to help, the family loses all chances of going anywhere. He’s worse than the kids.
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?” “Honey, where do we keep the kids?” and “Oh, was I supposed to put lunch meat on those sandwiches? Uh, where do we keep the bread? I’m just gonna throw the extra paper plates and bread wrappers in the sink, OK?”
So, with your science on straight, you may begin getting ready for a summer picnic. No, not this summer. You’re already too late for that one. I hear the park is lovely in October.
Burt tried that horn-honking routine once. ONCE. Never, ever again. Picnic with him at news@falmouthoutlook.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.