The car leaves at 7:40. Not 7:45 — the drop-off line at Felix’s school is a sovereign nation with its own traffic laws, and 7:45 means idling behind nine SUVs while three children age visibly in the backseat. For about a year, 7:40 was aspirational. We left at 8:05, twice a week with somebody in mismatched shoes and once — once — with Margot wearing Felix’s snow boot on one foot and a rain boot on the other, which she insisted was “the style.”
Here’s the system. It has two timers, one playlist, and approximately zero dignity.
The two timers
Timer one: 6:55, the ten-minute warning. It goes off in the kitchen. It is not for the children; the children do not respect it. It is for me, and it means stop doing the thing you’re doing — the laundry, the email, the standing in the pantry eating a granola bar like it’s a secret — and go to the entryway. The house leaves when the house is ready, and the house is ready when the entryway is ready.
Timer two: 7:20, the shoes timer. At 7:20 the timer goes on the entryway counter, set for ten minutes, and whoever has shoes on when it rings gets to press the button. That’s the entire prize. Pressing the button. Felix has treated this with the gravity of a bomb disposal and has not missed once since October. Margot’s shoes are on by 7:26 most days, worn on the correct feet roughly half of those days.
The timers work because they carry the authority. I am not the one saying hurry up; the timer is saying hurry up. I have outsourced villainy to a kitchen appliance, and the appliance and I are on speaking terms again.
The trick was never making the kids faster. It was making the clock the boss and me the co-worker who’s also racing the clock. Toddlers will not obey you. They will absolutely race a beeping thing on the counter.
The playlist
7:20 to 7:40 is “Get Ready Songs” — six songs, about nineteen minutes, curated by Felix with the iron fist of a five-year-old DJ. Two of the songs are the same song. One is a song about a shark that I have heard so many times it has achieved a kind of holiness. When the shark song ends, we are in the car. It has become a pavlovian miracle: shark song over, coats over shoulders, even Nora stops resisting the carry because the shark has authorized departure.
The playlist matters more than it sounds like it should. The transition out the door is the hardest transition of the day — harder than bedtime, and I’ve written a whole post about bedtime. Music gives the transition a shape with an ending, and endings are what toddlers actually understand.
What each kid needs, specifically
- Felix, five: Shoes by 7:20 (see: timer, button). Backpack packed the night before, because a backpack packed at 7:30 contains eleven rocks and a permission slip, unsigned.
- Margot, three: One coat. Not the red one — the red one is “for snow days only,” a rule she invented in November and has defended like constitutional law. Her coat goes on after her shoes, because reasons. Do not reorder the sequence. The sequence is load-bearing.
- Nora, two: Is carried out, always, regardless of mood, weather, or her own stated intention to “walk like Margot.” She walks like Margot for exactly four driveway-lengths and then becomes a sack of opinions. We leave the stroller in the car for the school run and accept our fate.
The failure mornings
Because honesty is the whole premise here: last Thursday the shark song played and Margot could not find the acceptable coat. It was in the wash. It had been in the wash since Tuesday; nobody, and I mean nobody, had flagged the coat situation. We left at 7:58. Margot wore the red one. She did not speak to me in the car, which at three is a sentence with a beginning and an end, and she was fine by pickup.
The system gets us out at 7:40 about four mornings out of five. The fifth morning, we’re late, somebody is underdressed, and I eat the granola bar in the car. That’s the deal I’ve made with mornings, and I’d make it again.
