"What are you doing?" Jack asked.

"I’m cleaning the bathroom," my husband replied.

Jack twisted his face into a look of concern, "What happened?"

Like any child confronted by an unusual event in a familiar environment, Jack didn’t know what to make of what he saw. The truth is that both of my kids witness housecleaning so infrequently that they consider the very activity evidence that some unfortunate event has occurred.

I rarely clean my house. Walk through my front door on any given day and you are almost certain to find dust collected on the coffee table and book shelves. You’ll spot books and magazines semi-stacked on floors and you might trip over those tiny, goody-bag toys kids gather like treasure. The windowsills between the inside glass panes and outer screens bear dirt deposited by seasonal storms and breezes, the wood floors do not gleam and there are blemishes pockmarking the bathroom mirrors — not to mention traces of toothpaste on the walls of the sink from kids who still haven’t learned to aim their spit in the center of the basin. In short, you will find dirt.

And I don’t care.

When I sat down to write this essay, the first thing I did was open my internet browser. It’s no secret to any parent that time is limited.I thought that I could perform a couple of Google searches, find a list — or several — of reasons why people thought it was so important to maintain a clean house when you have kids, and then refute those reasons one-by-one.

I was, however, surprised by the results of my searches. Site after site offered tips for how to keep a clean house when you have young children, how to get the kids to help you clean, even how to find cleaning inspiration when you have trouble mustering it on your own. But on no site — that I could find — did anyone bother to address the reasons why keeping my house clean should be one of my top maternal priorities in the first place. That’s probably because most people think the point is obvious. But it’s not at all obvious to me.

It’s no secret to any parent that time is limited. Once I’ve devoted six or seven hours of each day to sleeping, I’ve got about thirty hours of goals to squeeze into what’s left of any given day. I need to get the kids to school with all of their accoutrements, shepherd them to their activities, cook their meals, wash, dry, fold and redistribute their clothes, help with their homework, schedule doctors’ appointments and play dates, and so on. As soon as I get the kids out the door, I need to write and do all of the other things this business requires as well as fulfill my volunteer commitments at school, temple and around town. I need to shower and eat. I need to find the cat so I can take her to the vet. The last thing I want to do with any moments I have left over when all of these requirements are complete is clean.

I’d much rather spend time enjoying the company of my husband and my kids than battling with the detritus spawned by my house. I read Harry Potter to my seven-year-old son at bedtime. I listen while my four-year-old daughter takes me on long, sometimes incomprehensible journeys through the complex universe that lives in her mind. I accompany my children on long walks in the local apple orchards in autumn and together we marvel at the glowing reds and ambers of the trees, the hawks we watch as they dive for lunch, the apples we’ve just picked that taste so much sweeter than those we buy at the grocery store. We celebrate my kids’ and my own Jewish heritage every Friday night as we feast on challah I’ve made from scratch for them, we learn to cook and eat bulgogi together to experience a piece of my daughter’s Korean birthright and we share corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day in honor of my husband and my son. We watch movies together. We learn about the world, we play games, we have fun.

And no one in my family ever says to me, "Gee, I wish the house were cleaner."

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, let me assure you: I do have some standards. If I notice that a bathtub or the kitchen sink is truly vile, I clean it — or at least I ask my husband to do it. If the dust balls drifting out from under the couch become large enough to invite possible investigation by the Board of Health, I sweep them up. When the cat pukes— as she does almost daily —I clean it up. I am not a total pig. My kids eat off clean dishes and they wear clean clothes. That’s good enough for me.

I should also clarify that I have no objection to cleanliness itself. If I could, I would hire a cleaning service to come in every week and have them tidy and sanitize and polish the inside of my house until it could pass even my late grandmother’s literal white-glove test.  It’s the process of achieving cleanliness that I despise. Cleaning is tedious and repetitive, and it’s disheartening when you notice the dust regrouping on the piano before you’ve even finished wiping down the other side of the room. I know some people love to clean, including some of my own closest friends and family. (And then there was that Monica-character on Friends. I never understood her.) They find it to be a stress-relief. I find it to be on a par with teeth-cleanings and colonoscopies.

I don’t even do much cleaning for family and friends. I might walk through my house before guests arrive and deal with anything that doesn’t pass my "Is this disgusting?" test. Beyond that, though, I reason that no one wants to be friends with me because of my housekeeping skills or lack thereof. If you’re going to condemn me for the state of my house, then my guess is you’re probably not going to enjoy my company very much in the first place.

As far as I’m concerned, there are countless better ways to spend my time with or without my kids than cleaning. My mudroom may contain actual mud and my countertops may be sticky, but my kids, my husband and I laugh a lot.

And I’ll take that over a clean house any day.

I have changed my children’s names in order to protect their privacy.

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This article was written by Tracy Hahn-Burkett for Babble.com, the magazine and community for a new generation of parents.

Kids don't get to be kids for long enough, Ms. Orenstein wrote. Play is an essential part of any child's childhood, an indispensable tool to forming relationships and becoming socially and emotionally stable and there isn't enough of it in today's kindergartens. Drilling kids with flash cards pushes them to grow up before they are ready, robbing them of opportunities to learn necessary skills that will help them compete in our global society. Oops. I was robbing my child of his childhood. He probably wasn't "playing" nearly enough. As I read I imagined the track my bright little boy was on. He'd be the socially awkward, uncoordinated kid who never got invited to parties, acted out in strange ways and drew pitying looks from his classmates. He'd probably smell bad, too.

What had I been thinking? Let the kid grow up when he was ready. Sigh. I hadn't planned for things to be this way. I thought he'd be the rough-and-tumble little boy who roared at everything and bit the furniture as he stalked the house defending his territory. But when he showed interest in the letter "S" at twenty months on a cross-country flight, I snagged the opportunity to keep him quiet and contained. We looked for S's in the in-flight magazines calmly and intently for the rest of the flight. After that, his appetite for letters, numbers and words could not be satiated.

I had assumed I was doing a good thing, feeding his interests, giving him hugs and kisses when he learned new things and generally making learning fun and exciting. I even skimmed through a book, How to Teach Your Baby to Read by Glenn Doman and Janet Doman. The Domans assured me that starting young would make it easier for the child to pick up on new words and learn to read. The older he was, even kindergarten age, the more difficult it would be. As I watched my child, still shy of his second birthday, learn to recognize nine words in one afternoon — with less than ten minutes of effort on my part — I became a believer. The few minutes I spent each day showing him new words and then testing him on them later in the week were going to save us from a world of frustration once he was actually "old enough" to learn to read.

But when I was reminded of the power of play I decided to step back and watch for a while. Did my child even know how to play? I got out the wooden train set he had received for Christmas and spread the tracks on the floor. He spent a few minutes puttering around with them before coming to me and insisting I do it for him. Same story with the playdough. Hmm. At play groups I noticed him standing on the sidelines, unsure of what to do while other kids his age tackled each other, wrestled over balls and pulled things out of the toy fridge. Then he found a book and brought it to me to read to him. Hmm again. And finally, while playing at the park with some friends, he watched, puzzled, as two boys his age battled with sticks the size of staves. His own wand-sized stick, held loosely in his hand, remained unused. Certainly this was the lack of play that would prevent my child from forming lasting relationships, from figuring out how to build bridges, from becoming a contributing member of society. I hung my head in shame.

Still, I don't intend to stop my encouragement of his intellectual pursuits. Not only does it make him happy, it makes me really, really happy. Why? Because playing with him is, um, boring. And frustrating. He doesn't understand the rules of the games. He pushes me around indecisively whenever I let him take charge. He gets distracted. He makes messes that I have to clean up. Standing at the bottom of the slide waiting for him to come down and hovering beside him while he climbs up the tricky ladders at the playground lest he lose his teeth may be fun for him, but a mother can only take so much. We both need our alone time and, of course, we get it. But when we're together, I'd rather spend it doing something that has measurable results, something that I can look back on and say, "I taught him that." Watching him learn letters and words allows me to look back on the day and count it as a success.

And so, at my house, we blur the line between learning and play. We can spend a half-hour sitting on the couch bending chenille stems into Os or spelling out words on flash cards and be utterly delighted. To heck with building towers with oversize legos. Making Ts with them is so much more fun. Who cares about drawing, unless a W magically appears in the random scribbles? Now that is cool stuff. And so what if it's too cold to play outside? We've only read Corduroy four times. There's still plenty of fun to be had.

? "He's so cute," she says, touching my son's curls. "Still not walking?" His chubby fingers clutch mine as he inches towards the swings, wobbly as a newborn foal.

"Oh, you know.?He's getting there," I say, as if everyone walks around with a twenty-five-pound toddler death-gripping their thumbs. As if on cue, Owen drops to his hands and knees and speeds off, slap-slap-slapping across the filthy playground flooring.?

"He's a big boy," Playground Mommy says. "How old?"

"Thirteen months." ?

"Thirteen months?!" she says, eyes wide. "He's huge!"

That's true . . . except for the "thirteen months" part.?My son is actually seventeen months old, but you'll never hear it from me, at least not at the playground.? ?

Yes, I know it's nuts. As a reasonably intelligent, Birkenstock wearing, "Every child develops differently" type of gal, I always assumed I'd be Captain Awesome when it came to raising my own kid.?I pictured myself surrounded by a crew of happy, tow-headed tots, each secure in the knowledge that they were special Just The Way They Are. But all that flew out the window when faced with a gaggle of playground parents whose ten-month-olds were running laps around my older son.?

I'd round down his age down to the nearest month, shaving off a few precious developmental weeks.?"Oh," the parents would sigh, relief flooding their faces. "That makes more sense."At first I didn't think too much of it.?The babe had always been a little slow with the physical stuff, but I figured it was genetic.?His dad and I veer toward the "readerly" side of the athletic spectrum, so it made sense that he'd rather thumb through Goodnight Moon than run a 5K.?But then it started.?The looks. The tsks. The well-meaning advice from people whose charges were walking — running! — at twelve or nine or even seven months.

Within weeks I'd heard it all: Buy him sturdier shoes.?Buy him comfortable shoes.?Make him walk everywhere. (He's only crawling because you're not putting your foot down.) Don't let him watch television.?Tempt him with treats. One ancient grandmother-type recommended that I tie a scarf under his armpits and march him around the playground like a puppet.?

I've found myself considering it.

Still, my gut tells me he's fine. I've done the reading; I know that boys tend to be slower with language and that taller children take longer to walk. At seventeen months — and thirty-six-inches tall — he's as big as most three-year-olds, so it makes sense that his toddler brain would have trouble coordinating his preschool-sized parts.?But just to be safe we went ahead and had him evaluated to make sure we weren't missing any red flags. The physical therapist, a small woman with a reassuring smile, said that Owen was a little behind the curve, but physically and cognitively he was fine.?Better than fine, even.?Smart!?Social! Wonderful in all the ways that warm a neurotic parent's heart!?The best thing I could do for Owen, she said, would be to put down the parenting magazines and let him develop on his own schedule.?After all, nobody goes to college not knowing how to walk.?I know?she's right, yet all it takes is one raised eyebrow on the playground to send me spiraling.???

It started small, as most lies do. I'd round down his age down to the nearest month, shaving off a few precious developmental weeks.?"Oh," the parents would sigh, relief flooding their faces. "That makes more sense."?Gone were the furrowed brows and awkward talk of early intervention. Suddenly we could gab about normal things like nap schedules and vegetable aversion.?I was happy.?They were happy.?And my son didn't understand what I was saying so, hey, happy. ?

Of course I still have qualms.?It doesn't take an episode of Toddlers and Tiaras to know that it's a slippery slope between fudging a few facts and turning into a full-fledged Freakmother.?But some days saving face feels like the only way to keep my sanity. I know I'll have to stop when he's able to understand me, and that's fine.Until then, telling a white lie every now and then to avoid an hour-long lecture on footwear seems small in the scheme of things.?The less time I have to take to defend his (okay, our) honor, the more time we have for important things like playing chase.?Even if it's on all fours.?