Full Time Care

Picture from Threadless (they have a T-shirt based on the rhyme).

How many of you remember that old nursery rhyme? You know the one.

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly - perhaps she’ll die!

There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her;
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly - perhaps she’ll die!

And so on, through the bird, cat, dog, cow and horse.

Well, today I realised just how significant it is as a learning tool. Not only does it encourage kids to visualise (quite morbidly, I might add) and improve their memory, but it also teaches the utter pointlessness of escalation.

“Huh?” you say.

Allow me to explain with an example. My lady slept all day yesterday: she’s off the booze (aiming for five days, with today as the fourth) but was really tired for various reasons. She woke up at about 11pm.

Since she was sleepy, she drank a couple of strong coffees, intending to stay awake and do some revision for an upcoming interview. However, she was too sleepy and couldn’t concentrate. So she went back to bed and took some kind of pill to help her sleep. An hour and a half later, she still wasn’t asleep and felt awfully anxious (mixing caffeine and sleep-inducing pills will do that to you, hun). So she got up.

Since she was sleepy… yup, you know where this is going. I’d dropped off to sleep at about midnight (since I’d had 3.5 hours’ sleep the previous night - the cat’s sick again, with constipation this time), but she woke me up at 4:00 this morning to explain how utterly crappy she felt. She had so much caffeine and sleep-stuff in her that I wasn’t really surprised, but boy, was she in a foul mood.

So eventually - after I’d made her some… er… breakfast, I guess, and had my head ripped off for pointing out the silliness of the cycle of events - she went back to sleep. My being awake helps with that: she feels reassured to have me nearby with my eyes open. She slept a couple of hours, then got up again… and almost started the whole damned thing again. Thankfully, I caught her and pointed it out (without losing my head a second time).

So you see, knowing an old lady who swallows animals can teach us to avoid doing stupid, reactionary things that screw us up for hours on end.