Children are a lovely thing, all adorable in their tiny clothes, with minds still unsullied by the wide world that surrounds them. Sure, they can be a handful at times (a lot of times) but we still love them, even if sometimes it’s just because we have to (!). One of their more notable traits is the desire to explore everything around them in every possible way and to push the limits of their surroundings, just to see how far they can go, often leading to things getting more than a little messy. Bizarrely, I’ve noticed my kids –and those of my friends- have a strange attraction to the doors in my home, taking every opportunity to see what they can do with them, so without further ado, the five most annoying things that kids do with doors:
#5 “We don’t live in a barn”
It’s a simple one, but gosh does it get annoying over time – Yes, it’s the classic leaving-the-door-open-when-you-come-in-a-room trick. As soon as kids learn how to walk, they’re want to explore places of the house previously thought unreachable, this is a pretty understandable trait in amongst itself but do they have to leave the doors open everywhere they go!?
#4 “Don’t swing from there!”
Here’s another one for you – count the number of times you’ve walked into a room to see your child swinging from the door handle, weighing the entire thing down and generally being a nuisance. It’s likely been a good number of times, but here’s a horror story for you; one day, as I entered the living room to finally sit down, my son hung from the back of the door handle giggling cheekily to himself before a large cracking noise erupted and the door handle ripped straight from the wood, sending my son tumbling down and me to B&Q to replace the darned thing – all whilst reassuring my child that it was fine, but he mustn’t do it again.
#3 “It’s very nice, but what’s wrong with good old fashioned paper?”
Kids are an artistic bunch, with mile wide smiles when given the opportunity to draw what’s going on in their heads and see it come to fruition in front of their eyes. It’s usually for that reason that homes with children are usually littered with pens, crayons and all manners of paints, something that kids will always find use for. Cue spending the next couple of hours scrubbing as hard as you can, trying to get the pig drawing of mummy and daddy from the door before dinner.
#2 “I warned you about standing behind the door”
You can tell them and tell them, but children seem incapable of standing anywhere in the room but directly behind a door, meaning you either tentatively open every single door in your home, or your kid is getting a gentle nudge out of the way. Incredibly annoying and yet so simple! Genius, really.
#1 “Don’t slam the do-“.. “Oh, you did”.
Tantrums, tantrums, tantrums, an everyday occurrence in most households and apparently built in to every child is the desire to prove their levels of upset by slamming as many doors as possible. It’s by far the most annoying thing a kid can do with your doors, and gosh do they know it. Interestingly, this phenomenon has been noted back a long way in history, so it’s comforting to know the parents of yesteryear had to deal with the same nonsense.
Jakk Ogden writes for http://www.homesecureshop.co.uk/, a home security specialist helping consumers secure their homes with products such as home security locks and UPVC window restrictors.