#27: Patience

Ah, patience. It's kindof an art form in this instant, everything-is-at-your-fingertips-all-the-time world. By the way, if you consider yourself a patient person, add a kid to the picture and just see how you do.  In one of the great mysteries of parenthood, Lillian brings out my most patient side and also my least (sometimes almost simultaneously!). And pretty much every waking minute of toddlerhood is a test of patience in some way or another. If patience is something you struggle with and want to improve upon, I will happily lend you my child for an hour and I guarantee you will learn something. Heh.
But, I digress. This post is actually about Thomas and his capacity for patience.
I have admired Thomas' ability to be patient almost since the moment we met. He is patient at restaurants, at fixing things, at figuring out tasks, at waiting for the right time for something, etc. And on the whole, he is wonderfully patient with L. Perfect? No. But he tries, and she loves playing with him as a result. I'm sure that this quality comes in handy at work, as well, since as far as I can tell, being a software engineer involves a fair amount of "hurry up and wait" tasks.
One recent example of Thomas' patience involves his new smartphone (insert DROID noise here). It seems like smartphones have been around for forever, even though it's really only about five years. Despite being surrounded by shiny iPhones at work and with friends, T was willing to wait until the right time came for him to have one, adroitly recognizing that a) once you get one, you never go back and b)the data plan would increase our monthly bill. A couple of months ago, a harmonious chain of events happened such that T was able to take my dad's old Droid (thanks, Dad!) and we were able to lessen our minutes per month so that the data plan did not make a significant change to our monthly bill. So now we are "greeted" by the droid sound all day, every day--L loves to imitate it--and it has definitely been nice to have for answers to burning questions like: "What's the weather going to be like?" or "When does the UPS store close?" I almost miss hearing it when he's at work.
Almost.

Let's just say playing with a toddler at the beach is not for the faint of heart. And sand will be eaten.