Why Some Species Eat Their Young

I woke up late one morning last summer.

When I got out of the shower, our three-year-old daughter, Olivia, was still asleep. The Mrs. had gotten our two-year-old ready for school before she left for work, and normally I had plenty of time to get Olivia ready, but this morning, we only had about 20 minutes before we had to leave.

So I got Olivia up and prepared her favorite breakfast: a bowl of cereal. She then spent the next 15 minutes eating it. Recall that we only had 20 minutes to begin with. She'd take a bite, watch some TV, take another bite, dance around a little bit, watch some more TV, take another bite, talk to her sister, pick at her toenail, ask me if I remember some obscure event from three months ago that she claimed happened "last night" (because everything in her world happened "last night"), watch some more TV, dance some more, try out some gymnastics moves, comment on the birds outside, take another bite.......... I told her nicely that we were running behind, so we needed to hurry up.

That, of course, just made her move even slower.

When she FINALLY finished her cereal (including meticulously picking out just the right straw with which to slurp up the milk in her bowl), she announced that she had to pee. So I heard her in the bathroom taking care of business...but she never came out. I went back to the bathroom to find her sitting on the toilet, buck naked, playing with a doll.

"What are you DOING, Olivia?! We need to GO!" I said (slightly less nicely than the first time I tried to light a fire under her).

"I'm waiting for the pee-pee to come out," she calmly explained, as if I was an idiot for asking.

After a few more minutes, I got her into her bedroom, where she immediately rejected the clothes I had laid out for her. She didn't want to wear shorts. She wanted to wear a skirt. She didn't want to wear that shirt. She wanted long sleeves because "it's cold outside." (It was predicted to push 90 degrees that day.) She wanted to wear a pink skirt, green rain boots, and a blue long-sleeved shirt. I told her that she's going to be roasting by 9:00am, and her clothes don't match. "Yes, they do," she said. "No, they don't," I said. "Yes, they do," she said. A big argument ensued. For the third time, I told her that we need to get going. I'll admit, my tone was significantly less nice than the first or second times I mentioned it. Minutes passed, and Olivia was no closer to being dressed. And we still had to do her hair, which was a rat's nest.

At this point, I could feel my heartbeat in my eyelid, so I figured it was a good time to take a breather and step back from the conflict. I got my car keys to start loading the car with the daycare bag and some stuff for work. Well, my daughters are like Pavlov's dogs when it comes to the sound of my car keys. I can jingle my keys, and my girls are at the door in about a nanosecond ready to come along, wherever I might be going.

This conditioning resulted in disaster this morning.

As I walked into the garage with my arms full, already 20 minutes late, I heard Olivia screaming in her room like she's being murdered. The next thing I knew, she was running out into the garage, bawling her eyes out, shrieking at the very tip-top of her lungs, "DON'T LEAVE ME!!!!! I WANNA GO TO DAYCARE!!!!!"

Some significant details about this moment in time:

1) I had the garage door up, since I had just rolled the trash can out to the curb;

2) there were about a dozen neighborhood kids and their parents outside waiting for the school bus; and,

3) Olivia was still buck naked.

I'm really surprised that the police didn't show up about five minutes later.

I took Olivia back in the house and did the best I could to dress her, since it was like trying to dress a crazed wildcat on steroids. In the meantime, I counseled her on the negative impact of her dilly-dallying and arguing in relation to my ability to get to work on time when I had an early appointment, and especially in this economy where my employer has to cut 20% from its budget, and losing a job wouldn't really be the most opportune occurrence when our ability to maintain the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed is reliant on both of our incomes.

Of course, those weren't my exact words, and I seriously doubt that any culture in the world would consider my presentation to be even remotely close to "nice" at this point. My volume level had to be increased, too, since I was trying discuss this matter with her while she was screaming and crying and flailing everywhere.

She wound up with shorts on (but not snapped), a shirt over her head with one arm through a sleeve, no shoes, and her hair still in a rat's nest. I was sweating profusely after rasslin' the bear, and I had a couple of scrapes on my arm and something that I think is snot on my shirt. I'm really not sure whose snot it was, either.

At least our two-year-old was perceptive enough throughout this entire ordeal to just quietly climb into her car seat without saying a word.

Olivia then screamed as loudly as she possibly could at a pitch that came just short of shattering glass for the first fifteen minutes of the drive to daycare. Then it was dead silent the rest of the way.

Finally, as we turned onto the daycare provider's street, Olivia said, "Daddy? Remember 'last night' when you threw my shoes in the car?"

"Yes, Olivia," I said, "I remember that. It was 20 minutes ago."

"I caught one," she said. And sure enough, she had one shoe on.

Our daycare provider took one look at all of us on her doorstep, and I couldn't tell for sure, but it sure looked to me like she was stifling a smile and choking back a laugh. Olivia, looking like a blonde version of Little Orphan Annie, cheerfully gave me a kiss and bounced inside, ready to greet her playmates for the day, as if nothing happened.

About halfway to work, I was finally able to grin a little bit about it.

Shortly thereafter, my eye stopped twitching.