Pre-Parenting tests

[Aliya]

FOLLOW THESE 14 SIMPLE TESTS BEFORE YOU DECIDE TO HAVE CHILDREN:
For those of you this is too late for - take heart, someone understands your plight!!!

Test 1:

Women: to prepare for maternity,
Put on a dressing gown and stick a beanbag down the front. Leave it there for 9 months. After 9 months remove only 5% of the beans.

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

Test 2:

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:

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 12pm 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 is not as easy as it seems:

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.

3. Time allowed for this: 5 minutes.

Test 5:

Forget the BMW and buy a practical 5 door wagon. And don't think that you can leave it out on the driveway spotless and shining. Family cars don't look like that.

1. Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment.

2. 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:

Get ready to go out

1. Wait

2. Go out the front door

3. Come back in again

4. Go out

5. Come back in again

6. Go out again

7. Walk down the front path

8. Walk back up it

9. Walk down it again

10. Walk very slowly down the road for five minutes.

11. Stop, inspect minutely and ask at least 6 questions about every piece of used chewing gum, dirty tissue and dead insect along the way.

12. Retrace your steps

13. Scream that you have had as much as you can stand until the neighbours come out and stare at you.

14. Give up and go back into the house.

15. 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:

Go to the local supermarket. Take with you the nearest thing you can find to a pre-school child. A full-grown goat is excellent. If you intend to have more than one child take more than one goat. Buy your weeks groceries without letting the goat(s) out of your sight. Pay for everything the goat eats or destroys. Until you can easily accomplish this do not even contemplate having children.

Test 9:

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 soggycornflakes 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 lots of it falls on the floor.

7. You are now ready to feed a 12-month old child.

Test 10:

Learn the names of every character from the Wiggles, Thomas the Tank Engine and Disney. Watch nothing else on television for at least 5 years.

Test 11:

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 flower beds and then rub them on clean walls.

4. Cover the stains with crayon.

5. How does that look?

Test 12:

Make a recording of someone shouting 'Mummy' repeatedly.

Important: no more than a 4 second delay between each Mummy - occasional crescendo to the level of a supersonic jet if required.

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:

Start talking to an adult of your choice. 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's a child in the room.

Test 14:

Put on your finest work attire. Pick a day on which you have an important meeting. Now:

1. Take a cup of cream and add 1 cup of lemon juice

2. Stir

3. Dump half of it on your shirt

4. Saturate a towel with the other half of the mixture

5. Attempt to clean your shirt with the same saturated towel

6. Do not change, you have no time.

7. Go directly to work


You are now ready to have kids....

[BFG]

Too true, but when you ask any parent if they would change a thing....

[Burbage]

Ear plugs.

[azzam]

In the sleeping list they forgot:

2am, when your hand can't tap its back any longer without inducing Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, put rock music on stereo and lay baby on the speaker ( This was before iPods of course )

3am, place baby in the car. Drive round and round the block five times in your night dress.

[Lichtgestalt]

Too true, but when you ask any parent if they would change a thing....

Yeah, I love the standard answer: but a smile of the baby makes up for everything.. Yeah right, if you say it often enough you might as well believe it.

[Lili Von Shtupp]

Baby cuteness, therefore, must be a survival mechanism.

[Bender]

Fascinating. I could read about babies non-stop.

A slight diversion from the (admittedly fascinating) main topic: Had a conversation today with a co-worker who complained that all the free parking around our workplace is occupied by the time she gets to work because her 16 year old won't leave the house until 20 minutes before school starts. Daughter would rather stay in bed as long as possible than arrive at school early and wait for classes to start.

Co-worker said that as a parent (who therefore must arrive later and leave earlier than those without children), she was being penalised by having to pay for parking when those without kids, who didn't have the costs associated with children, were in a far better position to pay for their parking. I thought this was outright weird. When I said that having children was usually a choice that came with some trade-offs, and pointed out that breeders are, in part, subsidised by childless workers through the Australian tax system, the subject of conversation suddenly changed.

Why is it that so many Aussie parents seem to think they deserve special treatment? Last week, during a TV show about the effect of rising interest rates and the level of family debt, a family (with 1 kid) who couldn't afford the $900,000 mortgage on their McMansion (on a combined income of under $65k) were being forced to sell by the bank. The mother said that as parents they 'deserved' a 400 square meter home to bring up their offspring. Is this common thinking?

We were at a function recently where one of the kids (who it is obligatory to invite to all functions nowadays) complained that they weren't being served sushi, and later turned up his nose at the butter on the table, saying "I don't like that butter - it's not Lurpak".

I remember when I was a child our seating at the dining table was benches made of planks on kerosene cans. We went without many things, but I don't think we suffered. Nowadays kids seem to 'deserve' clothing with brand names, the latest gadgets, and gourmet meals.

[azzam]

Oh parents are so easy to clout aren't they?
Got kids yet Bender?

Edit: You're right though - a teenager with an opinion about butter brands is outrageous.

[BFG]

Too true, but when you ask any parent if they would change a thing....

Yeah, I love the standard answer: but a smile of the baby makes up for everything.. Yeah right, if you say it often enough you might as well believe it.

The Lightperson doth protest too much, methinks...

[Bender]

Oh parents are so easy to clout aren't they?

... and such fun! [smilie=gnigni.gif] Parents - especially the ones who think they're somehow special - are easy to clout. But it's not necessarily parents - just people with a warped sense of 'entitlement'.

Got kids yet Bender?

No, I don't have kids, have no intention join the breeders - personal choice.

a teenager with an opinion about butter brands is outrageous.

The butter kid wouldn't have been older than seven!


Another observation: I'm continually amazed by how many parents think their children are 'gifted'.

[azzam]

[quote="BenderThe butter kid wouldn't have been older than seven! [/quote]


That's even more outrageous!! Slap em down while they're young, the little toads.

They are all gifted in their own little ways. Mine especially...

[Zephyr]

Love it Ali!

[FurBaby]

Another observation: I'm continually amazed by how many parents think their children are 'gifted'.

maybe they said 'gifted' when they should have said 'speshul'.

[Possum]

When in LOve your partner is fantastic as well...same same lahhh

[azzam]

Don't agree. Your kids stay "speshful" forever. You don't fall out of love with them.

[cromasaig]

Parents are, by and large, subsidised by non-parents. But look on the bright side - any state benefits they're entitled to in old age will be being paid for by our 'speshul' sprogs. But even as a parent, I get irritated by the 'It's the most difficult job in the world and we should all be paid a million dollars a year for doing it' brigade.

But of course I'm blessed with more than usually gifted children..

From Ogden Nash's "Some of my best friends are children":

Whenever whimsy collides with whimsy
As parents compare their cherubs,
At the slightest excuse, however flimsy,
I fold my tent like the Erubs.

Of course there's always our child,
But our child is charminger,
Our child's eyes
Are a special kind of blue;
Our child's smile
Is quite a lot disarminger;
Our child's tooth
Is very nearly through.

And so on.

But then he also wrote one that started "Everybody who has a baby thinks everybody who hasn't a baby ought to have a baby,"

[Aliya]

One can only ask one question: If those who do have kids stopped, then there wouldnt be anyone left in the world. End of story. So society does owe breeders a debt, without constand offspring there will be no society. And definately no pensions, although the way they are going, they wont be around anyway...

[Bender]

We're happy we don't have kids - we have stainless steel appliances. The two don't mix.

[Scrummy Mummy]

[quote="Bender

Got kids yet Bender?

No, I don't have kids, have no intention join the breeders - personal choice.

.[/quote]

Neither did I, and now look at me

[Bender]

If those who do have kids stopped..

Overpopulation may eventually cause the collapse or demise of society anyway - the planet's getting overrun with people coz the breeders won't even slow down. Society is ultimately doomed anyway (how gloomy am I?). What remains to be seen is what we leave behind.

society does owe breeders a debt

Matter of opinion. I think they're entitled to support, but what annoys me is that some of them carry on as if they're doing everyone a favour by popping out offspring.

[azzam]

Oh what rubbish Bender. I'm sorry, but I don't seem to come across many of these whining parents. Most of them are too busy getting on with the job. Maybe it's different in Oz.
I didn't dare whine, I was competing in the same job market as everybody else, and asked for no special treatment at all. I didn't want to create any of the resentment you seem to be harboring.
If overpopulation is such a problem, at least, in the industrialised world, why are so many governements encouraging families to produce more? Germany, Oz, Nz, Sing, aren't they more worried about a declining population? Who's going to drive the economoy, who's going to subsidise your health care when you can no longer do it alone? The little tax payers we've bred that's who.

Each to his own.

[Burbage]

Who's going to drive the economoy, who's going to subsidise your health care when you can no longer do it alone? The little tax payers we've bred that's who.

You are my hero.

The only thing that worries me is the modern concept of treating children as if they are some kind of fragile precious commodity that should get everything they want. Is poor discipline and self-serving egocentricity going to serve them well when they have to earn a crust? I'm sure some will thrive. I have a feeling that many will suffer. It is these children we'll berelying on to keep the world going round when we are pensioners. I wonder whether they will contemplate mandatory euthanasia at 75 with the same horror as the previous generation. Who knows. But as you say, we'll be delivered into their hands whether we like it or not.

[BFG]

There is nothing special about having kids.

There is nothing special about not having kids.

Why does one side have to "win"?

It's a personal choice. I don't force you to have kids. You don't disparage my choice to have them.

End of opinionated micro-rant....

[Bender]

I think Burb has hit it by saying,

...the modern concept of treating children as if they are some kind of fragile precious commodity that should get everything they want. Is poor discipline and self-serving egocentricity going to serve them well when they have to earn a crust?

... coz I've had to deal with the product of that sort of upbringing in the workplace! Some young people have never experienced setback or failure, have gotten whatever they want and once they enter the workplace some of them have incredible expectations (meteoric rise to CEO, etc). Not their fault, they're the product of an upbringing in times of prosperity and strong economic growth. I've seen how some of them cope with setbacks, and I worry how they'll cope when the next major recession comes along.

I think the reason many economies are encouraging families is not so much because of a declining population - it's the aging population that's the problem. The ratio of working age vs. older age people is shifting. There was a large spike in the birthrate after WW2, and it's that group who are now heading into retirement, with the prospect of a longer lifespan than any group before them.

Australian social policy makers have responded by gradually raising the age pension eligibility age for women (it'll be 65, same as for men, by 2014), increasing incentives to invest in superannuation and stay in the workplace for longer (withdrawals from private superannuation are taxed as income until you reach 60 years age, after which they're not taxed), extending jobsearch obligation to income support recipients over the age of 50, and extending jobsearch obligation to income support (Parenting Payment) recipients whose youngest child turns 7 (there used to be no requirement to seek work until the youngest child turned 16). These are just some of the changes.

The Government also introduced a lump-sum 'baby bonus' payment, paid on the birth of a child. Most families seem to have used it wisely, but unfortunately there have been some single parents who have seen the bonus, combined with the changes to Parenting Payment and increased rates of family payments, as an incentive to have more kids and stay on welfare, not necessarily the best outcome for the kids. The sale of flatscreen TVs has boomed over the last few years and it's been said that that the baby bonus has partly contributed to the boom.

In my defence, I did say that some parents carry on as if they're doing everyone a favour. I have no problem with people having kids (it's only natural after all), and I didn't think there was any sort of argument going on here.

[Kooky]

Do you work with children, Bender?