Moana Time

We're on the second leg of our Thanksgiving holiday trip. Today was a 5.5 hour drive with a lot of 'how much longer?' coming from the backseat where my toddler waited impatiently to get there.

Toddlers are very smart and creative and can understand an amazing amount of nuance for being younger than some pairs of shoes I own.

Time is an intersting one though, specifically the passage of time. How to convey how much time has passed or must pass before arriving at a destination requires a bit of creativity. Hours and minutes are abstract and don't really convey the desired meaning for someone who has experienced very little of life.

We've settled on what I call 'Moana time'. This is where I describe the 'time to destination' in multiples of the full duration of the Moana movie, which I approximated to be 1.5 hours. So its 5 Moanas, or 3 Moanas, or 'less than one Moana!'. When its too far away from a multiple we add in Superkitties episodes, which I estimated to be 20 minutes long. So '3 Moanas and 2 Superkitties left'. This is a good system because it gives the toddler a sense of duration they understand, and its entertaining because we're using metaphors and playing a game.

Kids keep you honest as you need to describe things in very clear and precise ways and to do that you need to first understand the thing. And they force you to be creative because the method you'd normally choose to explain something probably won't work on a five year old.