Delay timer

hello

I want to get a delay timer in Flash Actionscript.
I have made a cartoon which wanders all over a playground.It moves from place to place and stops for sometime at every place.
I want some timer function which i can use to make the charecter wait at a particular place before moving to a new place.
I want a function analogous to the delay() function in C language so that I can pass a different parameter if I want the charecter to wait for a varied duration.

Please help me on this.

Smita