Before you have children, it's easy to kid yourself into thinking that you won't be one of those mums. You know, the ones who turn their child upside down to sniff their bum, or drag them screaming round a supermarket. But, I'm afraid, this fate is unavoidable. So, now that we've got that out the way, here are 12 previously unthinkable things you’ll do before your kid turns two...
1. Wear enormous pants
Nobody wants to wear pants that have to be unfurled like a flag, but when your mid-section has expanded enough to accommodate a baby then deflated again, some solid upholstery to yoink everything back into place is definitely in order.
2. Sniff a baby’s bottom in public
This is gross. Everyone knows it’s gross. However, when you’ve got a teeny-tiny baby wrapped up in a nappy, vest and babygrow, the only other way to check the nappy situation is to unwrap the layers like you’re playing a solo game of pass-the-parcel that you don’t want to win.
3. Eat three slices of cake in one day
When you’ve been involved in competitive office dieting, you feel guilty for accepting even a wafer thin sliver of lemon drizzle on somebody’s birthday. Combine sleep deprivation, boredom, breastfeeding and doing food prep one-handed, and a three-slice day is nothing.
4. Post babyspam
Parents are made to feel guilty about posting pictures of their children on social media, but once you realise that your ‘babyspam’ pics are more popular than anything you’ve ever posted, it becomes clear that people who don’t love a snap of a gummy grinning baby or cute toddler are in the grumbling minority.
5. Cut up food with your teeth
When you’re trying to eat your own food while holding and feeding a wriggling baby and/or toddler in a restaurant, and said restaurant only serves scalding hot food apparently specifically designed to choke small children, teeth become cutlery, no matter how revolting it looks!
6. Wipe snot with your sleeve
Children are, it seems, capable of generating their own bodyweight in snot every 24 hours and there are just not enough tissues in the world. When faced with being ‘that woman with the snot-faced kid’ or sacrificing a sleeve, the sleeve’s gonna get it.
7. Drag a screaming child around a supermarket
‘Why do people bring their screaming kids to the shops?’, the child-free ask themselves. The many answers include, we’ve run out of food, we’ve run out of gin, and, the weekends are taken up with PTSD-inducing children’s birthday parties. Chiefly though, because they’ve got as much right to be here as anyone else and if you want peace and quiet, shop online.
8. Have a staycation
Centre Parcs exists, surely, because getting on an aeroplane with small children and all their associated stuff, then trying to keep them out of the sun, share a bedroom with them, find food they’ll actually eat and locate a doctor to deal with the inevitable illness they develop is often too hideous to contemplate.
9. Drink at teatime
The phrase ‘teatime wine’ sounds pretty desperate to people who don’t have small children. This is because these people don’t have the food they cook thrown back at them and, by the time they’re opening a delicious bottle of something, parents are already snoring in bed.
10. Sing in public
‘Look at that woman singing nursery rhymes in the middle of the street, she’s lost her marbles,’ passers-by no doubt think. What they don’t know is that singing in the street, dancing in the newsagent and jumping in puddles are reason enough to have at least one baby.
11. Cry at... everything
Children singing on BGT. Old people holding hands in the street. All of Comic Relief. YouTube flashmob wedding proposals. Sad films, happy films, films about families. Photographs of animals cuddling. Photographs of children cuddling animals. You’re going to need a tissue… sorry, sleeve.
12. Enjoy kids’ TV
No adult wants to think of themselves as someone who’d make their child late for nursery waiting to see if the Octonauts managed to get the lonely humpback whale to his summer feeding grounds, or would rather watch Sarah & Duck than The Simpsons. Doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen though.
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