Lazybones

Flipper had a playdate-thank god-on Sunday. She led her friend upstairs, where my escalating electric bill has driven me back to hanging up all laundry to dry. The landing was draped with shirts and jeans and underwear. I heard her friend ask, "Why doesn't your mom use the dryer?" And do you know what she said??? "BECAUSE SHE'S LAZY." After I bored and exasperated both of them with the assertion that to HANG underwear from the linen closet door was, in fact, much LESS lazy than tossing wet clothes into the dryer and turning a knob, I retreated back downstairs, to pick up either my laptop or my People magazine and realized that...yes. I am a bit lazy. I do not, however, think that this is necessarily a bad way to be, parent-wise. I embrace, perhaps more fully than I should, Montessori's assertion that we should never do for our children what they can do for themselves. Never mind that it might take about ten hours longer to do than it should. I squelch my impatience, and return to my laptop and magazine.
There isn't much that Flipper can't do on her own, including taking a bath, washing AND conditioning her hair (and rinsing), picking out clothes appropriate for the weather, getting dressed, making a fried egg (all I do is turn on the burner and hover) and get out any type of activity she wants to do and going to it. I love this, although I feel a small pang every now and then when I realize that I am doing less and less of the non-stop maintenance work of child-rearing that so dominated the first few years.
Nonetheless, I don't want Flipper to think I am lazy just because she has to get her own paint sets out, drag her chair to the sink to fill up a cup with water, and get ready for bed, while I lie there, all warm and toasty under the covers, waiting for her to finish her ablutions so we can read. Except it is really me reading. This is one of the last things that she has no hand in, that she passively receives. She seems, much to my surprise, very far away from reading, and she attends a school that follows a model that encourages children to read a bit later than more typical educational models. And so, this is a place where I am not lazy, where we (I) read Every. Single. Night. So the next time she thinks its so easy to drape t-shirts over bedposts, I will remind her of this, "Mommy isn't lazy...she reads to you!!" (Even when I would rather be in my chair, with my laptop and my People magazine.)