Trouble with Scale

It’s sometimes hard to adequately describe the challenges of having seven kids in the house. Or in a car. Or anywhere. There often isn’t a good way to help someone on the outside understand the scale of what one kid times seven means. It’s kind of like a photo of an enormous mining dump truck that’s pictured alone; you can’t appreciate the scale of the equipment without some context. But if you superimpose a 1:1 size elephant into the photo, suddenly the scale pops and you can better appreciate the true magnitude of the dump truck that has tires bigger than an elephant.

I make pancakes for the kids on Saturday mornings. You can imagine there’s quite a few pancakes made, but that’s pretty easy to understand. Twenty plus pancakes may be a lot of pancakes but it’s also a relatable concept.

What’s probably not so relatable is my cringing when the boys want to put syrup on their pancakes. It seems like such a common thing. What’s so problematic about a kid having some syrup? I’ll try and provide an elephant next to the dump truck for you.

A kid having syrup on his pancakes will get some on his fingers. One sticky finger will end up being 10 sticky fingers. Which is a lot. But in our house, 10 sticky fingers is really 60 sticky fingers (soon to be 70) and those 60 fingers touch anywhere from five to 15 surfaces (the counter, a cabinet, the pantry, a doorknob, a light switch, the refrigerator, the freezer, their hair, the radio) each — and now we have an ant problem.

Oh, and since one of the surfaces they will touch or drip on is the floor, there are currently 16 feet that can step in it and then track syrup to dozens of more spots. Thus, syrup on pancakes may sound reasonable but can/will lead to more than 1,000 syrup touch points faster than you can say, “try not to spill."

If the syrup example didn’t pop like an elephant, maybe a real-world goat example will do the trick.

The city of Pflugerville is currently using a company called “Goatscaping, LLC” to assist with clearing vegetation and overgrowth near trails and the creek. Having one goat in 30 acre Pfluger Park wouldn’t cut it. But this company provides dozens of goats, temporarily pens them along the overgrown areas, and they go to work. They will strip a large area of everything green in a day.

Pick up time at our house could be like this. We should be able to release our little goat heard and knock out the picking up in a startlingly short timeframe. With more than a dozen hands it’s as close to the saying, “many hands make light work” as you can get. And while that does happen on occasion, typically what happens is what I’ll call reverse goatscaping.

Instead of picking up all the toys or tidying a mess, our little herd spreads out the mess and does a shocking amount of untidying in a staggering short amount of time. If all 20 cousins (under age 13) are at the house it’s even faster. In a matter of seconds a tidy house turns into a mess of toys, shoes, snack wrappers, and crumbs.

I wonder if you can rent the goatscaping herd to come to your house for cleaning up… And if that thought (call in the goats!) doesn’t drive home the scale problem I don’t think anything will.