Which is all rather good really, because you need that valuable breather to gather up the scattered felt pens and smeared sheets of paper which turn the living room carpet into the image of a licorice allsort.
So while you're doing that they are off on another brief adventure - returning with the hammer you had stored under the shelf in the kitchen.
"Give it to me, ta," is a sentence toddlers get to hear a lot of.
So anyway, the little one's attention was collared by the arrival of this animated offering on the screen, and that was fine, because it was a show designed for such an audience.
But I wondered what sort of early and impressionistic perception she would take from a show which features an elephant, a great pink pig, a cat, a dog and some unrecognisable species.
Nothing too odd in that, except none of them had legs.
They had wheels.
Big balloon-like wheels which they rolled around on; one even did a little wheelstand as he performed a joyful little jig.
Animals on wheels, huh?
No wonder she delivers a look of bewilderment when a doggy or a pussy cat wander past the pushchair ... on legs.
Mind you, we had Diver Dan when we were kids.
This guy never walked on a dry surface in all the episodes we watched. He was permanently under the ocean, attached to the surface by a long air tube.
And he talked to the fish and they talked back. I don't think it taught us anything, except fish have fins and not wheels.
The array of cartoonery and animation today is astounding and they appear over six or seven channels.
There are gentle tales of pretty little imps and fairies and animals, and there are tales involving slightly deranged creatures which verge on subversion.
I suppose in the long run it's a fair introduction to the world they face ahead.
I only hope the electronic arts, with its stories and games and pretty pictures, does not completely overtake the published arts - books.
Because books can stop exactly where you want them to stop when it's time for something important to be carried out.
Like dinner, or the nappy thing.
We have just received a new book in the house.
It is a phonebook and initially I feared it had been delivered over those couple of days when we had miserable rain fall.
Because it had shrunk.
We put it by the heater but it didn't help.
I was going to ring someone at the White Pages phone place but couldn't read the print properly and ended up calling a person by the name of White - my apologies.
Then I wised up and was told it was something to do with delivering what people wanted. A more compact phonebook. Are they kidding? It was already too easy to misplace the old and larger phonebook.
And something to do with use of paper and recycling - that whole environmental thing.
Well that doesn't wash either, because a large slice of the population is not going to recycle the old book because it's the only one they can read.
They'll probably biff the new small one, which means less paper in the recycling chain.
But I wasn't sure about this so tried to ring a recycler but because of the "fine print" I ended up calling a cycle shop - my apologies.
So, anyway, the good thing is it has lots of small pages, with lots of columns which are now the prefect size for little kids to learn to shape their printing on. If I could just get some wheels to fit on to it then all would be perfect.
Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.
