gniknihT

Here's a hint . . look at it in a mirror. Or just take the time to spell it in reverse. It's the word "thinking", and some backwards thinking is exactly what I was confronted with this morning.

Being Valentine's Day, Mandi and I took the time to get up early and make a special breakfast for the girls. She tinted some pancake batter pink, formed them into cute little heart shapes, and sprinkled them with candied hearts. We all sat down together to eat before Avery left for school. As we finished our cleanup and hustled Avery out the door the dishwasher finished its cycle. I offered to empty it before I went upstairs to get changed, but Mandi suggested that we wait a while and give the dishes some time to dry. She offered to do it later, while Lily and I were at the gym, and I thanked her for that gesture. Unfortunately, in the words of Phil Collins, something happened on the way to heaven.

The plan was for Mandi to meet us at the gym when we were finished, then we'd all carpool to the mall to pick up a few things. When I gave her the fifteen minute warning so she could get in the car to come pick us up, she groaned that she really didn't want to get off the couch . . but begrudgingly she made her way over there. She hopped in the car and regaled her story of couch-sitting and tea-sipping, then she casually mentioned that she'd neglected to empty the dishwasher. Now please understand that by itself, that would certainly not have been worthy of its own blog post. It's her day off, I want her to relax, and it's not a big deal for me to unload the dishes when I get home from the mall. It's what comes next, however, that just baffles me.

I suppose it was in an attempt to seem not-so-lazy that immediately following her admission came the following rebuttal . . "But I did get everything out on the counter and ready for dinner tonight!" "Let me get this straight", I said. "The dishwasher is clean but not empty, there are half a dozen dishes from breakfast still on the counter that need to go in to the dishwasher, and instead of emptying it and reducing the clutter you added cans and boxes for a meal that's not going to happen for 7 more hours to it?" Huh? In whose world does that sequence of events even begin to make sense? As if the retrieval of cans from the pantry is a time consuming step in the preparation of the meal? Because you did something it's OK that you didn't do the logical thing? What just happened here? I mocked her as mercilessly as I felt comfortable with . . being Valentine's Day I didn't want to take it too far . . but I need to understand where this kind of thinking originates. Is it another one of those genetically encoded things, like over-packing and maintaining your position that you have "nothing to wear" despite a closet full of clothes? Seriously . . to me, a small amount of laziness and procrastination is far easier to swallow than straight-up irrationality. You'd think, growing up with just Mom and 2 sisters and now having the wife and 2 girls, that I'd have started figuring out all these nuances of a woman's thought processes. I guess there are just too many of them for a man to ever grasp them all.