Sloth: a non deadly sin

My favourite animal is the sloth.  Always has been.  Even before the internet allowed us to see baby sloths eating flowers and yawning.

Sloths are happy and kind and peaceful, smiling benignly and slothing about.  Sloths make me feel good.  I don’t have to feel inferior and lazy when I think of what I don’t get done in a day.  I did more than a sloth.  Winning.

My favourite thing is to sit in the sun and read all day.  And in doing that, I prefer to use economy of movement.  So if I absolutely have to move, I like to plan out all the steps of the task, in order, so that I do the minimum possible.  Just like a sloth would.

A friend of my Mum’s has a theory that he calls the Heartbeat Theory.  He believes each of us have a predetermined number of heart beats, and so we shouldn’t use them all up doing silly things like exercises, which would hasten our demise.  I first heard this idea when I was about thirteen.  Stopped me in my tracks.  And I’m loth to test the theory even now.

My problem is: children.  They encroach on my slothful ways because they need things, like food and, stuff.  Lately, even worse, they have become indolent.  In fact, they are so lazy that they can’t even be bothered to find their own deadly sin to live by, they’ve just copied mine.

Today was a pupil free day.  A perfect chance for family bonding and fun activity, yes?

It started well: dippy eggs for breakfast, in the sunshine.

But we couldn’t go our into the sunshine because it was: 1. Too hot.  2. Too sunny and 3. Too hard to carry our plates outside.

So we sat inside.

Then The Weird One sniffed his spoon.  I don’t know why either, but he did, and apparently he then couldn’t use that spoon because, “It smells like Coco”.  Which is a bad thing.  Renders spoons unusable.   He couldn’t walk the three steps to get a fresh spoon.  Unfortunately, neither could I.  Coco said she would but: smell, so he had to turn the spoon upside-down and use the handle to get the egg out.  The sloths would be proud.

After breakfast I suggested some options, all of which involved some minimal effort like: getting out of pyjamas, going outside (and shockingly) walking the 150m or so to the beach.

So we stayed inside.

And we would have remained so, had I not had a brilliant idea after lunch.  Liam wanted to use his computer.  I had been expertly ignoring his pleas, so I made a bargain: if he had a swim, he could play Minecraft for half an hour.  He wanted all the details: how long did the swim have to be, did he have to go under, could he wear a wetsuit?  So he could make “an informed choice based on the costs and benefits”.  This was testing my lethargic ways, so I pushed him in.

And made him stay in until he was suitably bluish.

I let them have a shower afterwards to get that job out of the way warm up.  I asked them if they wanted to get dressed again or put their pyjamas on, and they both chose pjs.  Otherwise they “would just have to get changed again later”.  It was 1.30pm.

No wonder I love sloths.  They are my children.

What’s your favourite animal?  Do you live by a deadly sin?

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