The kitchen timer

I'll never forget the egg timer my mom had in the kitchen when I was a kid.  Despite being shaped and colored like a real egg, it was hard to confuse it for one.  With hash marks around its middle like the lines on a football field, it was easy to tell it apart from its likenesses in the fridge.  The egg timer never left the kitchen.  In fact, it often had a place of honor on the counter near the stove, or near the sink between a mama and papa bear salt and pepper shaker set.  By the end of its useful life, it had made its way onto a cute little shelf on the kitchen wall, silently displayed with a few other trinkets which Mom had collected over the years.

My kitchen timer, however, is light years from the old egg timer I remember growing up.  My timer is rarely in the kitchen.  My timer is used in many other rooms in the house.  Mine is digitial.  :)

Regardless of style, type, color or shape, the kitchen timer has proved, for me, to be more than just a useful item to help me boil my eggs to perfection, or to alert me to the doneness of a loaf of bread.  The kitchen timer helped me potty train my daughter, will soon be enlisted to do the same for my son, and helps me keep the family (including myself) on task when we have something to get accomplished.

I admit, I can't remember to remind my child every 20 minutes that it's time to sit on the potty.  Heck, I often don't even remember to go potty myself for large parts of a day.  Seriously, potty training a child takes time, patience, and a lot of trips to the potty.  My body wakes up at about the same time every day, but, for the life of me I can't take my kid into the bathroom at regular intervals without a reminder.  This is where the kitchen timer came in handy for me.  I considered purchasing one of those fun little potty-shaped watches that you can get online for about $10.  You let them wear it (if they'll keep it on) and set the watch so the timer goes off at pre-set intervals, hopefully reminding your child, "Time to go potty!".  Firstly, I didn't ever get around to ordering it.  Secondly, I wasn't sold that my tiny daughter would wear it, nor that it would even stay on her miniature little wrist.  I had visions of that thing sliding right off her arm and dipping right into the potty.  Building on the idea, though, I grabbed the timer out of the drawer in the kitchen, and I don't know that it's spent more than a few nights since then in the drawer next to the stove where it used to reside.

The timer was an amazing help.  Ethel learned how to turn it off each time it went off, and it was the perfect reminder for her to hightail it to the potty.  It wasn't long before she was reminding me to set the timer in the morning.

Right about the same time she was potty training (about 2.5), she entered that wonderful stage of independence, asserting her desire to do everything herself.  As any parent knows, most 2.5 year olds choose their battles carefully in this arena.  They have to put on their own socks on Monday morning getting ready to head to day care.  Or they want to put their own boots on while their older sibling stands there sweating in many layers of snow gear before everyone heads outside to make snow angles.  One of my favorites right now is when my nearly 3 year old, Fred, decides he wants to put his diaper in the garbage.  After I already did.  And he retrieves it from the diaper pail, and reenacts the act of throwing out the diaper.  At bed time.  After fighting to put on his PJ's.  I think you get the idea.

To help speed things up, or at least to set the precedent that time is a limited commodity and is not to be wasted, I pull out the kitchen timer.  You want to get your own boots on?  OK, I'll set the timer for one (or two) minutes, and when the timer goes ding, then I'll help you if you haven't got them on yet.  I will let you comb your own hair, and after two minutes, Mommy will comb it to make sure all the tangles are out.  And so on.  Of course there are still battles, but, I've set the limits, and I hope that they come to realize that we really don't have all day. 

Currently, Ethel uses the timer when brushing her teeth.  I explained that when we eat sugary foods, the sugar can cause cavities in our teeth.  In order to get the sugar off, we have to really focus on brushing our teeth.  We have a timer that sits in the bathroom most of the time, and Ethel actually won't start brushing her teeth at night without it (most of the time).  If she's had candy during the day, she doesn't forget to ask to set the timer.  She likes it to be set for two minutes on nights when she's had sugar that day.  Fred is even starting to get into the spirit of having the timer on when he's brushing his teeth.

The biggest thing I use it for these days is clean up time.  Ethel always was good about picking up her toys and keeping her room pretty tidy.  Some time after her 4th birthday, though, it all fell apart.  She has 2 hours of "quiet time" in her room each day after lunch, and she plays with nearly everything in her room some days.  We spent many a bed time cleaning up and putting things away.  That is until I whipped out the kitchen timer.  First, I set the timer for the duration of her quiet time.  I set it to go ding to signal her that it's time to start cleaning up before she can leave her room.  That's when I set it for anywhere from 3-7 minutes, which is her time limit for cleaning up in her room.  A tactic I borrowed from a friend, I have advised Ethel that anything left out when the timer goes ding will get put in a box and she will have to earn it back.  I can honestly say that in the close to 5 months that I've employed this rule, she has only lost one item, and she quickly earned it back.  Many days when the mess is large, I will allow her a little extra time as long as I can see that she's actually cleaning up, not just playing.  For us, it's worked wonders.

We use the timer to limit the kids' time playing with Splatster!, or for each of their turns playing it.  We use the timer at bed time so that the process doesn't last us all night.  We use the kitchen timer just about every day in just about every room in the house.  It's become a useful tool for us in so many ways.  No longer is the egg timer, or kitchen timer, just for the kitchen.