My Love Hate Relationship with Pinterest

Dear Pinterest,

Hello, my name is Margaret Rice and I am addicted to Pinterest.  I admit it – it is my television.  I love scanning and checking out all the activity suggestions.  I have been doing it since Pinterest started.  I have to admit though I am getting a little sick of all the perfect pictures. Can we please get realistic on Pinterest?  More and more I see these truly amazing activity ideas, with breathtaking photos of finished projects by preschoolers and toddlers.  I convince myself that this will be the activity tomorrow for my toddler.  In my delusional midnight brain, I picture my toddler sitting engaged by himself for at least 30 minutes to participate in this awesome Pinterest find.

When I awake in the morning, reality sets in.  It doesn’t start off too great.  In typical fashion, I don’t have all the supplies needed so I just make do with what I have.  I set it all up for my little one. The anticipation of having him occupied independently is making me feel so excited. He sits down.  I model how to do the activity.  He takes a turn.  Yeah he seems to love it.  Awesome, I will just slip away to the other side of the room and accomplish something.  The second I start the task on the other side of the room he is no longer interested in his activity.  I redirect him back to the activity.  He sits while I sit and plays.  I sneak away – he finds me.  We basically go back and forth like this for awhile until he loses interest in the activity.  I clean up and I’m usually a little grumpy since I was so pumped up he was going to just love this Pinterest idea.

Here is another scenario – I set the Pinterest activity all up (takes about 5 minutes) – he plays independently for 10 minutes – during that 10 minutes he trashes himself and the play area around him – when done I change his clothes, wash him up including his hair sometimes – I clean up area (takes about 20 minutes).  So for 10 minutes of independent play it took me 25 to set up and clean up.  You do the math, seems like I am operating in a deficit.

Now I have to be honest.  I blog and operate a website for a living.  I pin things from my blogs and website all the time. I LOVE Pinterest since it drives quite a bit of traffic to my website and I truly enjoy viewing everyone else’s pins.  It is visually engaging and helps me to dream big.

But, please let’s get real on Pinterest.  Can you at least show a few pictures of what went wrong?  Can you provide an estimated window of how much effort it will take me for set up and clean up versus actual kid engagement? Can you tell me how much money you spent at the craft store for all those awesome supplies?  Can you share that had supplies set aside but your kid got to them before you and used them for other purposes (ie pipe cleaners to decorate the rocking chair).