An expectant parent guide...

Heh heh, Aunty M sent me this a little while back so I thought I'd share because it made me laugh. A lot. It reminded me of the good ole days, around 2006 BM (before Madness).

FOLLOW THESE 14 SIMPLE TESTS BEFORE YOU DECIDE TO HAVE CHILDREN.

Test 1 - Preparation
Women: To prepare for pregnancy:-
1. Put on a dressing gown and stick a beanbag down the front.
2. Leave it there.
3. After 9 months remove 5% of the beans.

Men: To prepare for children:-
1. Go to a local chemist, tip the contents of your wallet onto the counter and tell the pharmacist to help himself
2. Go to the supermarket. Arrange to have your salary paid directly to their head office.
3. Go home. Pick up the newspaper and read it for the last time.

Test 2 - Knowledge
Find a couple who are already parents and berate them about their methods of discipline, lack of patience, appallingly low tolerance levels and how they have allowed their children to run wild. Suggest ways in which they might improve their child's sleeping habits, toilet training, table manners and overall behaviour.

Enjoy it. It will be the last time in your life that you will have all the answers.

Test 3 - Nights
To discover how the nights will feel:

1. Walk around the living room from 5pm to 10pm carrying a wet bag weighing approximately 4 - 6kg, with a radio turned to static (or some other obnoxious sound) playing loudly.
2. At 10pm, put the bag down, set the alarm for midnight and go to sleep.
3. Get up at 11pm and walk the bag around the living room until 1am.
4. Set the alarm for 3am.
5. As you can't get back to sleep, get up at 2am and make a cup of tea.
6. Go to bed at 2.45am.
7. Get up again at 3am when the alarm goes off.
8. Sing songs in the dark until 4am.
9. Put the alarm on for 5am. Get up when it goes off.
10. Make breakfast.

Keep this up for 5 years. LOOK CHEERFUL.

Test 4 - Dressing Small Children
1. Buy a live octopus and a string bag.
2. Attempt to put the octopus into the string bag so that no arms hang out.

Time Allowed: 5 minutes.

Test 5 - Cars
1. Forget the BMW. Buy a practical 5-door wagon.
2. Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment. Leave it there.
3. Get a coin. Insert it into the CD player.
4. Take a box of chocolate biscuits; mash them into the back seat.
5. Run a garden rake along both sides of the car.

Test 6 - Going For a Walk
Wait.
Go out the front door.
Come back in again.
Go out.
Come back in again.
Go out again.
Walk down the front path.
Walk back up it.
Walk down it again.
Walk very slowly down the road for five minutes.
Stop, inspect minutely and ask at least 6 questions about every piece of used chewing gum, dirty tissue and dead insect along the way.
Retrace your steps.
Scream that you have had as much as you can stand until the neighbours come out and stare at you.
Give up and go back into the house.

You are now just about ready to try taking a small child for a walk.

Test 7 - Communication
Repeat everything you say at least 5 times.

Test 8 - Grocery Shopping
1. Go to the local supermarket. Take with you the nearest thing you can find to a pre-school child - a fully grown goat is excellent. If you intend to have more than one child, take more than one goat.
2. Buy your weekly groceries without letting the goat(s) out of your sight.
3. Pay for everything the goat eats or destroys.

Until you can easily accomplish this, do not even contemplate having
children.

Test 9 - Feeding a 1 year-old
1. Hollow out a melon
2. Make a small hole in the side
3. Suspend the melon from the ceiling and swing it side to side
4. Now get a bowl of soggy cornflakes and attempt to spoon them into
the swaying melon while pretending to be an aeroplane.
5. Continue until half the cornflakes are gone.
6. Tip the rest into your lap, making sure that a lot of it falls on
the floor.

Test 10 - TV
1. Learn the names of every character from the Wiggles, Barney, Teletubbies and Disney.
2. Watch nothing else on television for at least 5 years.

Test 11 - Mess
Can you stand the mess children make? To find out:

1. Smear peanut butter onto the sofa and jam onto the curtains
2. Hide a fish behind the stereo and leave it there all summer.
3. Stick your fingers in the flowerbeds and then rub them on clean walls. Cover the stains with crayon. How does that look?
4. Empty every drawer/cupboard/storage box in your house onto the floor & leave it there.

Test 12 - Long Trips with Toddlers
1. Make a recording of someone shouting 'Mummy' repeatedly. Important Notes: No more than a 4 second delay between each Mummy. Include occasional crescendo to the level of a supersonic jet.
2. Play this tape in your car, everywhere you go for the next 4 years.

You are now ready to take a long trip with a toddler.

Test 13 - Conversations
1. Start talking to an adult of your choice.
2. Have someone else continually tug on your shirt hem or shirt sleeve while playing the Mummy tape listed above.

You are now ready to have a conversation with an adult while there is a child in the room.

Test 14 - Getting ready for work
1. Pick a day on which you have an important meeting.
2. Put on your finest work attire.
3. Take a cup of cream and put 1 cup of lemon juice in it
4. Stir
5. Dump half of it on your nice silk shirt
6. Saturate a towel with the other half of the mixture
7. Attempt to clean your shirt with the same saturated towel
8. Do not change (you have no time).
9. Go directly to work

You are now ready to have children. ENJOY!!

Fun tip: Look into what it will take to freeze your kid when they're 12 and thaw them out again when they're 20. Take into account the cost, the red tape as well as any psychological damage, such as developmental delays or your child hating you with sadistic passion, that such a procedure may incur.

Serious tip: Breathe through the temper tantrums. If your Madness is anything like mine -- and when it comes to the actual tantrum, I would say that one toddler is the same as the next -- getting mad or trying to bring an end to it yourself will only escalate the situation, making it even more stressful for everyone. Breathe, your little baby can't help it.

Bubbles are my friend!

Since Madness entered the phase of Getting What He Wants Through the Art of Screaming Until He Gets It, I have struggled in the afternoons. Especially the rainy afternoons. What can we do when I am exhausted from the screaming and he is grumpy because I refuse to let him get away with that kind of behaviour?

Last week, on a whim, I bought a tube of bubbles. Madshee loves them in playgroup, and when he was smaller I would use them to distract him at busstops and train stations and during Mummy Time at cafés with friends. Now I use them nearly every afternoon when it’s rainy.

And peace reigns again in Casa Crikey. Well, something resembling peace, at any rate.

I still really hate the screaming, but if I ignore it, or if I can calm him down (when he lets me) then it’s not too bad. Mostly. And when all else fails, I can suffer safe in the knowledge that somewhere in my house is a tube of bubbles. Probably in a shoe or behind a book case.

Fun tip: Hire a bubble blower and take a nap in the afternoons while some random person is blowing bubbles with your Madness (shee).

Serious Tip: The bubble machines are great in that they blow lots and lots of bubbles. I don’t like them because hunkering down on the floor with Madness and blowing bubbles for him are really lovely, loving, bonding moments that I would miss out on if I ran a machine.

Busy busy bear!

The thing about mothering a toddler is that they go from this precious little being completely reliant on you for all things, to this precious little being who wants nothing to do with you, thankyouverymuch, unless there is food to be eaten, or a back to climb on.

Madness says "busy busy bear". Or something that sounds like that. Big M and I are puzzled as to what it could actually mean, as he says it often in all contexts. It's dead cute, though. And English! YAY! With a little bit of an accent.

Maybe it's Madness' way of saying "Mummy, you are a busy, busy bear. You just had to go and join a gym, and you're learning Spanish until June, and you're getting your licence and having to have lessons. You work. You're in the middle of decluttering our house to get it spick and span forever, and when are you going to find time for me? Busy, busy bear."

Poor little neglected bunny. He's all right, really. We have lovely afternoons of doing something outside the house, so that's fun (and necessary, as a Banshee has come and replaced my son with itself, and screams the house down if I don't go out RIGHT THIS MINUTE!). I do try to make Mad-shee ask nicely, but its hard when it's pretending to be a 17-month old. Humans are so volatile at that age!

Apart from me being a busy, busy bear, there is not a lot to report. Madness is going to become quite the artiste and as soon as I can breathe again and cut down on my extracurricular activities, I will teach him all kinds of fun things.

Not that I can draw. I'm pretty much only capable of teaching him clever things like swear words, which is less fun when you're the mother, and not the cousin/aunty/babysitter.

Fun tip: Hand your Madness to a complete stranger on the street, mid-tantrum, and scream "It's your turn!"

Serious tip: Don't give in! You're the Mummy, that's why!

Baby nap times... or lack thereof

Madness had a 45-minute nap today. Forty-five minutes. As opposed to 2-2 1/2 hours! So this afternoon was fun. He was fine as long as I was doing exactly what he wanted me to do... like letting him throw his lunch on the floor.

Despite me telling him no twice.

Madness went to his bedroom for the first time today. Aww, my baby's growing up! Good times at Casa Madness! I counted to 45 before letting him out again. Tough love, baby. Tough love.

Today, I also discovered two fantastic resources for Madness Mums everywhere. One, Saving Mum, is Australian, but can be adapted to any country. You can always Google names of things you don't recognise to find out the translation. Sure bet is if you live in a western country, there aren't many things in Australia that you don't have in your country. It's generally just called something else.

Also, and the one I'm maybe even more excited about is FlyLady.net. Oh my! So very Organised and Efficient. If you feel overwhelmed, rundown and a little out of control because you're living in clutter and don't know where to start fixing it, then this site might just be what you're looking for. I've put both links in my resources, on the right-hand side of this blog.

After the short nap and the crazy overreactions, I was more than grateful when Dimples's Mum called to say that we could meet this afternoon, after all.

Big M was also grand when he got home, sweeping the kitchen and the soil that had mysteriously fallen out of the plant pot (I wrote power plant just then, so is my day!) onto the lounge room floor.

Fun tip: Let your Madness do whatever they want. Actual parenting is tiring, and a pain in the butt.

Serious tip: Count on the people around you, seek help from them, let someone know you're struggling. If you pretend you're efficient and coping, they won't know to offer help, so you have to ask them to, instead. Do it. Even if it means asking for an afternoon of You Time.

Ministry of Monotony

The older your child gets, the less time you have to mess around on your computer. Sucks for me, because my job is online, and half my friends are online friends (yeah, I’m glad that doesn’t make me as sad as it would have ten years ago, too) and I have less time to update my various Internet projects.

That was a convoluted way of apologising for the lack of regular updates.

Madness has hit the 15-month mark and sprung two more molars. The poor guy’s pretty much not going to get a break from that till he’s 2 and all his teeth are through! It makes for pleasant afternoons, when I have to make the choice between gum gel at four and then probably about 2am, or at bed time and then not again till the next morning. This sounds like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?

It would be if I didn’t apply the gel at 11am, and hence can’t for a couple of hours. Ah, fun times!

The other day, as I was coming home from playgroup, I pondered a bit on the monotony of motherhood. That sounds like some psychological condition, written out like that.

“Don’t worry about Mrs. Madness, she’s in the clinic, getting treatment for MoM”

“For the Minister of Magic?”

Insert blank look of non-Harry Potter fan. “Whatever, she’ll be back with us soon.”

HP fan continues to look confused.

Sorry. Tangent. Anyway, I was pondering this, about how utterly tiring some days can be because of the simple routine-ness of it all. Vicious pondering, indeed, but necessary. See, sure motherhood can be monotonous. These little beings need routine and predictability like adults need oxygen. However, all jobs become monotonous after a time. This happens perhaps more quickly in motherhood because it’s a job we do 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for pretty much the rest of our lives, obviously with varying degrees of intensity.

Take heart! Do not despair! My ponderings brought me to one conclusion. Nothing, nothing, can fill a worker with more joy, or sheer fulfillment, than the delighted laugh of your baby as you lift them up over your head and spin them round like a mad thing (not adviseable for newborns, obviously).

No job, either, allowes you to truly feel successful and excited by the accomplishments of others. The first smile, the first roll, the first tentative grip towards a favourite toy. All of those things fill us with indescribable feelings that no other job can offer.

We just don’t care about other jobs like we care about mothering our maddness (maddnii?). Makes the occasional boring day that much more tolerable, doesn’t it?

Fun tip: Actively enjoy your toddler loving your partner more than you. Why sit around moping and feeling jealous when you can go and have a quick soak in the tub?

Serious tip: A toddler is almost always motivated by the attention he gets from his parents. This is a hard time, because he is acting out, in a way, and wanting to be set boundaries. You read that correctly. If Madness goes a bit crazy emotionally, I rub him on the back and reassure him that it’s all right. I wait him out. It's not always easy, I'm not a patient being. But it's so so necessary.

If he uses those emotions to say, hit a child in the face (something that has happened to him, rather than him doing it to someone else), I would not rouse on him or yell or ask him what he was thinking. I would simply say a firm no, remove him from the situation, and pay attention to his "victim". This is nicer, less stressful on everyone and it actively teaches him that hitting children not only doesn't get him any attention, it gets another child LOTS of Mummy attention. If the crazy behaviour persisted, I would take him outside and let him cry it out. Standing watch over him, obviously. I’ve found this, in my observations of other mothers, to be the most effective way of dealing with what is potentially a very awkward situation.