 |
contact l privacy l partner sites |
| Home > Articles > Parenting |
|
Complete list of parenting articles The power of a toddler By Karen Town Its Sunday…A Day of Rest! Could somebody please tell my children that? Today I was rudely awoken at 6am by shouts of ‘I’ve finished’. I hate it when my four year old yells this out because it never means ‘I’ve finished tidying away the 15 million toys that are all over my bedroom’. Oh no – it only ever means one thing! When exactly does a child learn how to wipe its own bottom? I come downstairs (not much point in going back to bed as now the baby is awake too) to find that we have run out of coffee. Not good! There is only enough milk for one bowl of cereal and so I try to convince my four year old that she wants toast, when clearly she doesn’t. I decide that I really should get started on my laundry. Now I don’t know about you but the worst part about doing laundry is folding the clothes. I hate it. What I hate even more though is when your two small children decided to use your neatly folded clothes as a bouncy castle. Deep breath and count to ten… I go in the kitchen to clean up after breakfast. I swear that I’m only in their for ten minutes and in that time my youngest little ‘darling’ has managed to pull out all of the family photo albums and rip out the pictures. Not just take them out, actually tear the pages of the album. I pick up all of the pictures and shove them in a drawer. Upon my return to the kitchen I find that my four year old has found a pencil sharpener and is trying to see how many pencils she has to ‘kill’ to completely cover the floor with shavings. I try hard not to scream. Very cleverly around this time the husband decides he needs some ‘essentials’ at the store…Hmmm. Lunch time rolls around and of course they don’t like lunch. It’s a sandwich. Nothing fancy but of course, they don’t like it. Fine! Leave it! One of them (or both because no one is owning up to it) tears a book to shreds. Not a little paperback. Oh no – if you’re going to be destructive, might as well make it worth your while! Choose the nicest biggest most expensive hardback classic! The pages are torn into millions of little pieces. I remember that somewhere I read that if your child draws on the walls in order to teach them a lesson you should make them clean it off (they haven’t done that yet today but hey they’re not in bed yet so never say never). In this vein of thinking I instruct my four year old to pick up all of the pieces of the book. She does it quite quickly and there isn’t a trace. I can’t believe it. Where are the pieces gone? I ask. She doesn’t answer. I ask again. Silence. Now I’m starting to get a little concerned. Then I discover why she won’t tell me what she did with the pieces. They are all stuffed (the whole book) down the toilet. Deep breath and count to ten. Then the whinges start. ‘I’m hungry’ I hear. I want to say ‘really? Do you think it may have something to do with not eating your lunch?’ but they tell me that sarcasm is lost on children and I think they are right. The four year old chooses yogurt. The pink creamy kiddie kind. She eats three of them. During that yogurt eating frenzy she manages to take my brand new black fabric dress shoes (the shiny evening kind that kill your feet but are oh so fashionable that you suffer the pain) out of their box and cover them with yogurt. After ten minutes of trying to clean the shoes, I give up. The yogurt is not coming off. I go back into the lounge and find my 20-month old sitting on the floor, surrounded by the photos that I had put in the drawer. She has taken them out and is sitting there slowly and methodically ripping each one to shreds. I snap. I am crying. I am on the floor trying to salvage what is left of my photos and I am sobbing. I’m a broken woman. It only took them one day to achieve it. Never underestimate the power of the TODDLER!!
|
|