want me to stick a broom up my bottom and sweep?
my great friend charmaine is full of wisdom. when she is racing around the home while working on her excellent business www.adoptionprofiles.ca and organising a swimming pool or extension of her home being built, and someone asks her to take on another task, she is wont to say with a smile, "and would you like me to stick a broom up my bottom and sweep the kitchen floor while i'm at it?"
being a naturally curious type, i usually say yes, but that's just me.
so the other night, charles and i were in bed and we decided it was time to put together a lego Christmas present that young sebastian had received; a star wars thingie that luke sits in. it can fire rockets and drops green bomb like things. anyway, it has several million tiny pieces and there was no way that sebastian and his two minute attention span was getting near this lego. charles promised to put it together for him, and after two weeks, sebastian was getting anxious for the promise to come to fruition.
charles started off doing the construction all by himself. he opened the manual and read the first of the 68 pages, nodded and carefully ripped open the seven crammed full packets. i watched out of the corner of my eye and said nothing.
after 10 minutes i began grabbing the pieces that magnificent was going to need ONE STEP before he was going to need them, and handing them to him.
five minutes later i said, "i am sorry charles, but i need to tell you that you could be a lot more organised. i know this is your deal but watch." i rushed into the kitchen and returned with eight plastic bowls. carefully i emptied the contents of the packets into the bowls, and that left one empty bowl.
had i made a mistake? I THINK NOT.
that empty bowl was for putting the next step pieces in, so charles could have easy access to them.
we worked, for the most part silently. (but much more efficiently. not having to riffle through the plastic bags and painfully usher each little piece to the top saved us valuable minutes). but five minutes into the "new bowl scheme" which does sound quite appropriate for china, my friend and husband charles started asking me occasionally, "what do i do with these pieces?" or "where do these pieces go?"
to this, i answered quite patiently, "i don't know. you have the diagrams." occasionally i even said "love" "honey" or some other endearment at the fore or aft of the sentence. but i mean, i had no idea! i wasn't looking at the overall picture, i was looking at the pieces that were needed and speedily scanning through seven bowls trying to find and collect those pieces (sometimes multiple numbers of those same pieces not to mention differing colours of those same pieces) before my husband could say, "got the next ones ready?" i wasn't looking at the diagram!
after the, (i kid you not, no exaggeration ) 20th time he asked me this, i turned to him and said, "honey, do you want me to do it all myself? you are putting the model together, remember? i am just gathering the pieces for you! it is my job to get the right pieces, it is your job to put them in the right places." (very micro/macro economics). and then i believe i made the charmaine comment. it was an appropriate time for it.
he looked at me and his face crinkled up and he started laughing.
"i just thought you knew where it all went!"
he haw-haw-hawed over that for a while (we lost precious time) but in the end the spaceship was built (and admittedly i didn't always give him the right pieces), and it looked good. but it looked better the next morning when it was in sebastian's hands and sebastian of the shining eyes was thanking us.
