I’m not here to tell you how to live your life. But if you’re a parent, trust me. These are these things you should never, ever do.
1. Take a good, close look at your walls. They will make you want to cry and then hose down your house with disinfectant.
2. Swear. Even if your kid still pronounces “banana” as “babana,” as soon as you drop a profanity —just once—the little tyke will say it perfectly and repeatedly. In the most horrifying of places, of course. Like the doctor’s office. Or your grandmother’s house.
3. Assume that “the toddler who never gets into things” won’t get into things. Our toddler was not the type of kid who would take my $900 camera off its hook, unearth it from its protective bag, and smear liquid hand soap all over it. But, oh yes. He did.
4. Mistake silence for peace. Silence with kids in the house usually means one of three things: 1) They’re doing something they shouldn’t be. 2) They’ve exited the premises without you realizing it. 3) They’ve simultaneously knocked each other unconscious.
5. Reach out your hand when a 3-year-old says, “Here,” without looking to see what she’s giving you. I’ve been handed many a booger that way.
6. Stick your finger down the back of a diaper to see if it’s wet. This one seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised.
7. Give a toddler an Oreo. The combination of toddlers and Oreos creates a chemical reaction that makes matter multiply and spread like a virus. I’m still finding Oreo smears from the time I gave one to our daughter when she was three. She’s now eight.
8. Lean over a crouching child and startle them. A child’s head is a concrete wrecking ball and your nose is a bulls-eye. I’m surprised more parents aren’t killed by having their noses crushed into their brains by little kids’ heads. It hurts. Badly.
9. Tell a kid that the plugged toilet will overflow if they keep flushing it without also explaining that that would be a bad thing. There’s nothing as exciting to a 4-year-old boy as an overflowing toilet.
10. Blink. You’ll miss something. It might be something adorable, it might be something abominable, but either way, it’ll be something you didn’t want to miss.
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Comments 9
i needed a good chuckle tonight (quietly snorting because I just put my two year old to bed). #6 – I still find myself relearning that lesson. Thank you for helping to put life in perspective and for making me laugh.
LOL silence can be terrifying when babysitting brothers ages 4 & 7…fortunately my own little monster is only 2wks old so silence is peaceful for now…I expect that to change in, oh, maybe a year 😉
I have bitten my lip so any times because of my daughter’s tough noggin. Most recently in church, where I had to stifle my cry of pain.
Seriously. It’s so painful. Like, worse than childbirth. Almost.
I can’t believe I haven’t had my nose/eye socket/teeth broken by my kids’ heads yet!
What’s really fun is when they smash your nose up into your skull, and you grab your face, hold onto something solid for dear life, swear that you see a tunnel and a light and hear angels singing and are about to meet your Maker . . . and your kid is bouncing away, totally fine.
I blinked and my newborn was a big sister and almost 4. I blinked again and the other newborn was 5 months. I decided to tape my eyes open
We should make a new product – Mom Eyelid Tape. We could make a billion gazillion dollars!