Sperling Central

Sometimes things just occur to you quickly.  You know?  If you’re driving, the light in front of you turns red and you know instinctively to stop the car. There’s beeping in your kitchen and you know right away that the casserole is done. Your child is acting sluggish and withdrawn and you seem to know instantly that he is sick.

Other things dawn on you more slowly.

To tell the story, you’ll need to know about two rules in our house.   One, children do not go into the front yard without a grown up.  Two, if you make a mess – you clean it up.

The weather has been nice here in San Diego.  One day last week, the boys were hot and wanted to change into their swim suits.  No problem. They wanted to use some water outside.  No problem.  (They put it in a watering can and take turns splashing each other.)  I was inside cleaning the kitchen, but after 15 minutes, they were having so much fun, I decided to take pictures.  As I went outside, I was initially at a loss to understand what they had done.

Those of you who are quicker with connections, will see that the boys had run a garden hose up to the top of their play house, secured it to one of the beams, and turned on the faucet.  Presto!  A waterfall in their fort. I found it SO ingenious that I immediately started snapping pictures of all the fun.

So cool, right?  These boys are just creative.

Really quite clever, running a hose up to that playhouse.

And I was still just snapping away with the camera.  How charming was THIS?  Ah, such sweet boys.  Then, as if in a cold medicine-induced stupor, connections began forming at an un-alarming rate and the whole story started to take shape.  I blinked in slow motion.  It was pathetic.  It had been several minutes and it was only just now occurring to me.  My gaze wandered over the scene once again.  The internal dialogue in my murky mind sounded like this:

“Now – hey.  I’ve seen that spray nozzle before.  It’s that cool kind, like we have in the front yard.  I didn’t know that Mike bought two of them. (Pause.)  Mike didn’t buy two of them.  (More slow blinking.)  How did Jon manage to get the spray nozzle off the other hose and get it on the one back here?  Wait.  We don’t have two hoses.  We lug this baby back and forth between the front and the back.  This is our only hose. (Synapses firing at a glacial pace.) Jon has been in the front yard, disconnected it from the faucet, hauled it around back, reconnected it, and then built a waterfall.  (Big sigh.)”

I wrapped up my praise and enthusiasm and brought the picture-taking to a close.  I invited Jonathan over for a discussion about his creation.  (For those of you who feel it was hasty on my part to ascribe the hose incident to Jon without inquest, your point is taken.  But I do know my boys.)  We talked about how brilliant, how inventive, and how fun his creation was.  Then I moved on to asking questions about how my young inventor actually thought of it.  How did he get such a neat idea? Where did he find the supplies?

The supply question was Jonathan’s undoing.  He didn’t even answer the question.  He just looked at me. “Fine!” he announced, “I’ll never build anything cool again!”  The sparkle had come clean off the waterfall.  He stomped off, giving himself a self-assigned session in time-out, so that he would beat me to the punch.

When I excused him, he got up to go play inside.  I quietly and casually mentioned that, of course, before he went inside, he would clean up. You know — empty the hose, disconnect it, take it to the front yard WITH ME, and reconnect it there.

I guess moms are not the only people who can have a slow dawn experience.  Jon looked at me as if I had spoken in Greek.  He blinked. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.  He looked down at his feet, at the hose, and back at me.  He finally found his words, “You mean I have to clean it up??!”

My answer of “of course,” was not well-received.   He seemed to have no idea why HE should be expected to take care of it.  Explanation was in vain.  He had no idea HOW he was going to get the hose back to the front yard, as it was so heavy.  But, what he was capable of doing quickly and secretively the first time, he was equally capable of doing the second time around – albeit less quickly, less quietly.

It’s a lot to expect for a rule to look like a red light in Jon’s eyes.  But the hope is that the next time my boy would like to test the house rules, he will have a slow dawn experience of a different kind.  Maybe the kind that says, “Hmm…  I should ask permission first.”  It would go a long way in keeping the sparkle on the waterfall.