My daughter turned five this Christmas. Today she almost believed me when I told her tomorrow is New Year. She then judiciously cross checked it with the head of operations, her Mom and realized that it’s two days later. To her, it doesn’t matter if it’s tomorrow or two days later. To her, a New Year is shouting Happy New Year in the middle of the night. She doesn’t even know that the New Year is as long as 365 days. I mean, she knows that it has more than 300 days. Emotionally she doesn’t know that 365 days is a long time. Time is not even relative. It's her own understanding of time.
Even school time (from 8am to 2pm) is just one block of time for her which has a beginning and an end with a lunch interval in between. So if it’s the sixth period and class is about to get over in 15 minutes, she really doesn’t know. To her, lots of periods are over. So chances are this will also get over. But she doesn’t know it is going to get over soon. She splits day and night with light. So if it’s cloudy in the morning, it takes some time for her to believe that it’s morning. (Or I guess she just goes with the flow as we push her to school). She has her classic ‘five more minutes please’. It’s different from our ‘5 more minutes’ that we usually say when we wake up. If she says I want to watch TV for 5 more minutes, it could be one more hour or two more hours depending on the mood she is in. On the whole she is not so much bothered about time. Her time is divided into ‘fun with friends’ time, study time, TV time and outdoor time. Time is not yet so precious to her. While other things are – like her Mother, Father, cousins, friends, toys and her dress(in that order:-))
