Parental Guilt

So our youngest daughter came home from nursery school the other day with one of those handprint/poem thingys that they love to spring on you every year. Now, the kids have each had fantastic teachers over the years, so I don't want to sound ungrateful, but it is a wee bit presumptuous of a teacher to send home parenting advice in the form of a four-year old's art project, don't you think? Like I need any more people in my life laying a guilt trip on me. All of a sudden I am being told what I can be upset at my kids about? I have an idea - maybe my three kids can go over to their house for a month and coat their bathroom in a healthy layer of toothpaste, and spill milk, chocolate milk, lemonade, water, juice box, maple syrup, and three unknown, random, but incredibly sticky liquids on every piece of furniture they own. Then they can find melted candy bar, gummy worms, potato chip crumbs, half eaten lollipops, and chewing gum in their car. Then, my kids can ruin their $3000 paint jobs by creating Sharpie marker 'murals' on their walls. Then my kids can each run through a field covered in dog doo and goose crap and drag that mess onto every rug and carpet in their house until the whole place smells like the backroom of a kennel in August. Then, when they are absolutely about to go ballistic, I will hand them a laminated handprint and pithy poem that says "please don't be mad at me because I'm little and I'll be big soon", and see who they try to strangle first - the kids or the idiot who handed them this freaking poem!

I love the idea that being four years old is some kind of get out of jail free card. What, being four is suddenly a license to trash my house? At what age am I allowed to be upset with them oh Ye of Infinite Patience? Does there come a point where denting my car with a tennis racket becomes a punishable offense? Or am I to look the other way for all eternity because someday they will be older and ticking me off about more important things? So kindly save the guilt trip for someone else and just send home the egg carton caterpillars. Or so help me, I'll send my four year old to your house on a 95 degree August day eating the biggest Popsicle you have ever seen in your life.