Monday, June 15, 2009

There ought to be a rule

There ought to be a rule that kids can't ask for things that aren't even close to being agreed to.

The other day a friend of mine posed the question "Are three kids really harder than two?". My friend is already pregnant with her third child, so I didn't feel the need to respond to her question. Of course it is harder, but why scare you now? Sometimes it is crazy hard, but it is crazy good too.

What I think is hard is the amount of words coming at you at all times. Endless questions, endless "can I...", endless requests, endless noise. It is hard to quanitify what makes this so tough, but it is enough to make me run screaming from the room (frequently) and prompts someone to say "kids, you need to give your mom a minute."

If there could only be a successful rule that says they can't ask for things that aren't even a slight possibility. No more having to say "no candy" when they ask at 9 am. No more having to say "no slip-n-slide" when it is 59 degrees outside. No more saying "I already said I DON'T KNOW WHY".

I estimate that cutting out the questions that shouldn't have been asked in the first place would reduce the amount of talking aimed at mom by 7%. While that isn't a large percentage, I think it would reduce the overall word total I hear every day by 234,982 words.

And I am not exaggerating.

3 comments:

  1. Hopefully Sydney is done with it by the time Caden can start in more fully...We can only dream.

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  2. After spending 3 days in the car with two kiddos, I completely agree with you. There were so many questions, primarily from the 6-yr-old, that were just utterly non-sensical... like, "can we go swimming when we get to the hotel" (at 1am), or, "can we go back to the theme park" (when we're 500 miles past it) or, "can we call Daddy?" (when it's 6:00am in Seattle) ... it would have cut out a ton of words just to eliminate those!

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