I drink a lot of tea. This is my drink of choice. I don’t do it for health reasons exactly (we drink organic coffee and tea though) and I don’t particularly like herbal “tea” (as it often has no tea to speak of) but I do drink a lot of tea. I mean it: A LOT. At all hours of the day and with great frequency. This means that I’ve got a tea kettle on for most of the day. Tea kettles whistle. Timers (for brewing time) beep. There is, in modern times, a lot of noise surrounding the process of making tea. Since I was the daytime dad for our son during a substantial portion of his life so far, tea became something he was accustomed to. Not the drinking of tea, but the process of making it.
Just recently I’ve been spending lots of time in “the dungeon” of our basement working on various things related to my dissertation. Sometimes I turn the tea kettle on, go downstairs, and am unable to hear the whistling above when it eventually heats enough for me to pour myself a cup. Even if I am aware of the whistling tea kettle my tea still has to steep after it’s been poured. That means waiting for a beeping timer to sound off. During any one of these situations I may find myself unable to hear the sound that signals an action for me. This is where our lovely son comes in. He knows the sounds and he knows the process and he knows who it is that needs to know. I hear knocking at the top of the stairs and the words “Dada? Tea!” It’s sweet and it’s helpful and it’s adorable. What’s not to love. These, my friends, are some of the small joys of being a parent. I change his dirty diapers and he let’s me know when my tea is ready. It’s a fair trade I think.