Tests to Determine if You're Ready to Have Children

Somebody sent this to me when I was pregnant and we had a good laugh over it, smugly thinking to ourselves "ah there are soooo many people out there who have no idea how to parent.  Enter us PERFECT parents to be..." Today's healthy recipe on my blog: Humble Pie.

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 behavior.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

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.

What the hell happened?

The first of hopefully many blogs! I say hopefully as I am a serial "starter" and serial "non finisher" (or commitment phobe as I like to call it).  I am great at trying new things and coming up with sometimes crazy plans, but not the best at seeing them through to completion.

Life has done a complete 360 in the past year when I became mom to my fabulous, fun, beautiful and unfortunately virtually sleepless daughter, The Little Princess.  Fitness and healthy eating somehow went out the window as large meals, sugary cups of tea and not-the-healthy-kind granola bars saw me through sleepless nights, feedings, the days where the crying and fussing seemed never ending, and the days when the baby cried too.  My long ago adopted and much loved vegetarianism disappeared out the window along with any hope of wearing a bikini as I just grabbed whatever was quick, easy, and sadly, calorific.

As my fellow new moms gasped in surprise as they were fitting into their pre pregnancy size 10 skinny jeans within hours, days, or weeks after giving birth to enormous 11lb babies, I was gasping in surprise as my weight went up and my maternity clothes gave way to new clothes in a size much larger than I would have liked.  Oh how I longed to visit said skinny friends with boxes of krispy kreme donuts and secretly pinch their sleeping-through-the-night-already little cherubs.

I had plenty of excuses at the ready..."they have their families nearby, mine is thousands of miles away so I get no break"..."I'll start exercising when she sleeps through the night and I'm not so exhausted" (um...I will likely be arthritic and collecting a pension when that happens)..."I'm breastfeeding, the weight should just drop off."  (who knew that a newborn doesn't consume more calories than are in an entire pack of chocolate digestives?!) The simple truth is that there is no good excuse for not eating healthily and exercising moderately.

Fast forward ten months and my plan is simple.  No quick, overnight fixes.  No fad diets of eating only cayenne pepper on Wednesdays during a full moon.   No surgery, botox, or cheek implants made from the semen of rare red squirrels (or whatever the current fad is).

1.  Healthy, non packaged as much as possible food, in moderate portion sizes
2.  Exercise and work towards my goal of completing a 10k race within a year
3.  Return to vegetarianism and my love of vegetarian cooking
4.  Scales are evil - the fit of my clothes will tell me just fine how I'm doing
5.  Share my journey

Happy reading, and I would love your thoughts, feedback, experiences, criticisms....