Springtime and Hollering Kids

I am grateful for the spring weather but now that my windows are open, I am sure that, to the neighbours, my house sounds like the Colliseum with gladiators and lions in battle.

I love that I’m a stay-at-home mom but the constant fighting and screaming between my three boys is getting out of hand. I love my boys - I truly do - but this past week my kids have been so incredibly loud and high strung that I would sell them on eBay to the highest bidder. I would then take my money and run away to some South American country for ten years. (I say ten years because living it up in some Latino country dancing the salsa and drinking mojitos in my late thirties is pushing it, but to continue doing it in my late fourties would be downright shameless).

Everywhere I go I feel like I have the loudest, most defiant boys in the room. What am I doing wrong?

I don’t know what to do. The terrible twos is quite a difficult stage to discipline. And how do I teach two two-year-old boys how to share - they are always fighting over some toy or a cookie or for just being in the way.

My best friend called me the other day and as I’m talking to her on the phone, the chaos of my three boys fighting continuously drowned out our conversation. The sad part is I am so desensitized to the noise that I only noticed things were getting out of hand when my friend asked me, “Is everything Okay? They sound like they’re killing each other." I nonchalantly reply, “No, that’s just them fighting over a toy.” As my oldest twin is sitting on my youngest twins face.

I sit back and ask myself why do my three boys sound like this? Is it the European blood? Like Oedipus Rex, no matter how hard he tried to run away from his destiny, the Oracle lead him to still sleep with his mother and gouge out his eyes with his own hands. Because my kids have Greek blood pumping through their veins, am I too plagued with some Greek tragedy?

Greeks are dramatic by nature. How are my three boys ever going to be docile, calm, well behaved boys, with a perfect hair line?

Like synchronized swimmers, Europeans communicate with their hands, everything that comes out of their mouth is so filled with passion and emotion they can’t sit still and talk. They have to use everybody part available to them when telling a story. So if this is innate then I ask you how can I fix it? Or better yet does it need fixing?

Kids will be kids and if my kids are louder and more energetic than most, then I should embrace it for what it is as opposed to racking my brains finding methods to cure it. That being said, I’m not going to let them barge into your house like three Tasmanian Devils and allow them to leave nothing standing. But I will allow them to be kids.

Bottom line: there is no cure for the terrible twos and there shouldn’t be a cure for energetic kids.

Some children are docile and some children are not and we could attribute it to culture, diet, parenting, genetics, etc… But what I do know is that children are innocent, beautiful creatures struggling to understand the environment surrounding them.

When I open my windows on a hot summer day and my incredibly noisy kids can be heard miles away and my neighbours judge me....well, that’s their shortcoming not mine. There is nothing wrong with my loud Greek house, because the love in the air matches the volume in our voices.

So if Super Nanny 911 has a problem with the volume of my house I just have two things to say to her: Welcome to my big fat Greek house and would you like some tzatziki with your souvlaki?

Patsy S.