So the fluffy bunny adverts would have us believe that being a parent is all roses and small naked babies wrapped in poofy looking towels , toddlers are always smiling and playing , older kids get messy but then they are all cheeky scamps so that's all ok.
Anyone who thinks parenthood is even remotely like that is deranged, childless and last seen rocking in a corner dribbling. Allow me to give you the pants eye view of parenting. The abridged version.
Babies.
So hours of labor, nine months of not being able to see your ankles, fit into anything remotely looking like clothing and not a floral bin bag and puking till your eye balls pop and you have a small screaming red faced drain on your sanity.
the first few months it's a round of.
Are they breathing ?
Why are they crying?
Are they too hot? Too cold ? Hungry ect ect ect.
You are left drowning in dirty nappies, covered in projectile vomit that smells strangely milky and deafened by the hours of screaming. You read all the books ( well i didnt ) You listen to all the well intentioned advice ( nope didnt do that either ) and your tired. Now by tired i don't mean ooo i think i'll just have forty winks tired i meant tired to the brink of dribbling insanity tired.
It's not all bad though.At least they haven't started moving. You can leave them in one place and know that when you come back if you haven't fallen asleep in your soup or the washing up, they will still be there.
But babies become toddlers.
They move. They put their fingers in plug sockets . The smell of their poo takes on a whole new eyeball melting edge as they discover all the foods that you eat. When they aren't throwing the food around the room, feeding it to the dog or smearing it over the walls it's coming out of the other end. Sometimes it leaves you wondering how did something so large come from someone so small.
The best thing about this is when they have found that they can move about , they don't like staying still. Nappy changes become like an endurance test. First take your child. Now pin child to floor and strip offending area, trying not to throw up at the smell. Note to self take off socks before foot treads into open soiled poo filled nappy ( been there ). How many of you have at this point begun to loose the will to live and found yourself singing to the child what your doing ? Da dee da dee da now some cream on your bum dear la la la . Yes anything to stop the screaming midget from trying to roll over before they are cleaned dressed and sorted.
Then there are the food fad's . The children that only eat certain things. The tantrums, the children that don't sleep, and the dreaded potty training. potty training deserves it's own blog . It's awful , it's messy, the amount of washing triples, no room in the house is safe and it seems to take forever.
There is one good thing about having a small child they look up to you. Most of the time between the ages of well two and ten they seem to do what you tell them. They don't answer back that often and they seek your approval on most things. If you say jump they mumble a bit but they jump in the end . I find a death stare usual helps . The kind of stare that says i can chop you up and fit you into the oven if you don't do what i say. Starting a rumor about the child that didn't do what they were told and were never seen again seems to help to.
Now we have puberty. Your house becomes a war zone. It's house of the rising hormone. Your every word is now challenged. Nothing you do is cool anymore. Even the word cool isn't well cool. This is the time when boundaries are challenged , when children seem to be at their most expensive. They don't go to bed. they moan about how embarrassing you are. They seem to think that every time you bend over money magically appears from your rectum. They spend forever in the bathroom or point blank refuse to wash all together. They don't listen to music anymore. It's noise and it's played loudly. You find yourself doing the one thing you would never ever do . You become your own parent the person that you swore to yourself you would never turn into. You tell yourself that you were never this badly behaved when you were your children's age when in fact you were probably worse.
Does this ever end ?
Well the worrying about them never does. You'll always be embarrassing and horribly uncool . But you'll also always be the one person that has been there. You mopped up the sick. You were the one knee deep in poo. You were the one that spent time smeared in food. You went to every parent teacher meeting at school. You always told them that you believed in them and that they would succeed in whatever they wanted to do.
That's why even though it's the hardest thing in the world to do being a parent is the one thing i am glad that i have done poo and all.
And so the pants have spoken.
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