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WEIGHING IN – The one January snowstorm powerful enough to close schools and daycares this year came at a frustrating time for our family.
Like many households with young children, we’ve been dealing with a brutal cold season. The combination of normal illness, COVID-19, the flu and RSV has resulted in months of incessant coughs, sneezes and two streams of yellow mucus running down my 22-month-old son’s face. We lovingly call those “The Slugs.”
That snowstorm came only a few days after my son had been home sick with pink eye and an ear infection, and it meant that after my wife and I had just spent business hours trading off on childcare duties, we now had to spend another weekday devoted to looking after the little ones.
As a kid, I used to wear my pajamas inside out in the superstitious hope that it would appeal to the snow gods and lead to canceled classes. As an adult and father, I’d become the kind of guy who’d rather have cold rain than fluffy snow if it meant the kids could go to school.
So I was grumbly the morning of the snowstorm, upset it would set me further behind on work. Alas, what could we do? My wife and I agreed to take shifts, and I planned to take my daughter sledding in the afternoon.
I invited another family from our street to join us, and as soon as I started griping to the mom about another day of missed work, she cut me off.
“Yeah, but we can’t ever get this time back, so we should enjoy it,” she said.
As the girls sang some silly made-up song in the backseat, I realized my neighbor was onto something. When we become parents, we’re often told to savor the time we have because children seem to grow up in an instant. The days can feel interminable, but the years fly by indistinguishably.
It turns out, there is a scientific explanation for the disparate ways in which we perceive time.
“We don’t have a single perception of time,” Peter Tse, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College, told NPR’s health correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee for a January report on this very topic. “We have a perception of time in the moment — perceptual time, you might call that. And then you have how you regard time by looking through your memories.”
The brain’s sense of time comes from how much information it is processing, Tse explained.
When we’re mired in the monotony of routine, we’re absorbing less information and, basically, forming fewer memories. As a result, days and weeks seem to fly by. Yet the tediousness of these tasks can make it feel as if the clock’s hour hand is stuck.
On the flip side, if we’re trying a new activity, experiencing a new place or just doing something outside of our normal lives, our brains take in more information, which slows time in a way that allows us to form lasting memories, even if the time passing feels fleeting.
Chatterjee’s report explored how so much of parenting is about routine — putting on socks and shoes, putting food on the table, putting the kids to bed. But when we build in new experiences, we allow ourselves to create memories and hang onto their childhoods for just a little bit longer.
We cherish milestones like our baby’s first giggle because of the novelty, while a diaper change likely won’t lead to a lasting impression because it’ll simply get lost among the piles of other dirty diapers.
“The more you break the day out with different activities or different things to do, then the more chance you’ve got of making these nice memories — the things that you’re going to remember, the things that are going to help to stretch out your retrospective feelings on how the years passed,” U.K. psychologist Ruth Ogden told Chatterjee.
This week has been one in which many of us have stepped outside our routines. The kids are off from school, so we take time off, too.
My family and I are currently visiting my mom in Florida, where we’ve been kayaking and playing in the sand, visiting the children’s museum and the zoo. But we’ve also passed a lot of hours doing little more than splashing in the pool.
All of this is delightfully outside our normal weekly pattern. As a result, I’m likely to remember many of the simple joys, just as I remember my daughter falling asleep in a hammock and my son giggling while swimming during last year’s visit.
That’s why, when this all-too-brief vacation ends, I’ll do what I can to recall the snowstorm. I’ll remind myself that while I can’t easily remember the columns I wrote that week, I have a vivid mental image of my daughter and her friend flipping the sled only to pop up in belly laughter.
It’s not every day I get to take my daughter sledding. So, going forward, I just might start wearing my pajamas inside out.
We could all use a few more snow days.
Columnist Andrew Waite can be reached at [email protected] and at 518-417-9338. Follow him on Twitter @UpstateWaite.
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