I'm No June Cleaver

Is thirty minutes of quiet play really too much to ask of an almost four year old? I sent her up there not five minutes ago and already there is a ruckus during Rimatime. I am asking for thirty minutes (OK, an hour) in which I can blog, read, nap, clean, meditate, blog, web surf, pick lint off the rugs, gnaw my cuticles, etc., etc. Things I love to do. And Vija knows the rule. When it is quiet time, we play quietly in our room with our quiet toys so Jonas doesn't wake up (because Jonas wakes up if you so much as think about him).

She ain't up there but five minutes, the crashing sounds begin. I know she's diving off her bed into the swishy sea (or maybe jumping around the slippy slithery snakes), and I'm ready to explode. I go stomping up there like the bad-ass little mama I am and explain about how if I have to go up there one more time to tell her to play quietly, the shades are going down and it's naptime for Vija. (In another day and age, I might have threatened to open up a can of whoop ass, but, alack.)

Is that really so bad? But I suspect that other mothers don't go all apeshit about this stuff like I do. You know, little things like spilled milk, food sculpture, getting mac-n-cheese dumped on my head while I'm on the floor picking up the already fallen mac-n-cheese pieces when any sane woman would just wait for the carnage to stop before going in for the cleanup mission, etc., etc.

I have a very low tolerance for many of the behaviors associated with small children and, judging from careful observation of mothers at the local story hour, I am beginning to suspect that I am in the minority here. These women, when their kids starts throwing books off the shelves and being general pains in the tushie, crouch down to their level Supernanny style and say things like, "Honey, that's not a nice thing to do, is it? We don't throw the bookies off the shelvie welvies, do we? No we don't, no we don't, sweetie pie!" Meanwhile, if my kid pulls something like that, I'm like "JONUKAI! NE! NEGALIME! NE! NE! NE!"

Tolerant, I guess is the word I'm looking for. I'm not tolerant. I expect my three year old to act more like a thirty year old and my one year old to act, I don't know, five? Poor kids.

But here's my point, and it's something my mom passionately believes: we "modern moms", despite all of our "conveniences," are making things harder on ourselves than necessary. To illustrate (and I don't condone this), my mom knows someone who basically kept her kids in a playpen pretty much all day so she could do housework, smoke, play bridge, what have you, and she didn't even think twice about it. Now, I'm guessing she might have had a little more fun than I am currently having.

Extreme, I know. But if I put Jonas in his Pack-n-Play for even five minutes to do a load of laundry, I actually feel like I should go ahead and call social services on myself. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Of course, my mom also cites infant car seats, the no nuking bottles rule, and breastfeeding as examples of ways in which modern mothers are shooting themselves in the foot. But that is a topic for another day.