My Top 7 Parenting Joys: Not!

When that magical moment of becoming a parent for the first time happens, the joy of your very first child taking their first breath and entering your world, nothing but happiness, and love fill your heart.

You are in awe of this little human being that you have created with your life partner. You will never want for anything in life ever again. Your child will be the centre of your world forever, every movement you make will centre around your child. The sky will be full of rainbows and the sun will shine all day long. Life will be a rollercoaster of parenthood joys, and from this moment on you will never have a bad day.

WAIT JUST MINUTE!

Some of that at a push may be true, but that is the romantic version you may have had before you became a parent. Then reality sinks in, and your life will undoubtedly become this.

Here are just a few things that maybe you didn’t quite expect when you became a mummy or daddy.

1. Sleep. What sleep? You simply don’t get any lie-ins. Everything related to sleep as you know it disappears out the window. You will wake up more exhausted than when you went to bed. The bundle of joy, yes, your child will keep you awake half the night every night. This I warn you will continue for years. A full nights sleep? What is that? This is a question you will ask yourself everyday guaranteed.

2. Nappies, nappies and even more nappies! The smell of poo is simply in every corner of your home. Babies are experts at filling those nappies with poo and let’s not forget all that wee, which will happen a zillion times a day.

3. Your sofa will start to resemble the sofa’s at most soft play centres, in that you don’t really want to sit on them with all the stains of goodness knows what, with enough germs manifesting themselves that if let loose on the human race would probably wipe out the population of a small country in seconds. Yep, that’s what happens to the your sofa you lovingly picked and kept in pristine condition, until the baby was born!

4. Every room in your home, as well as your garden and garage will resemble a toy shop that nobody has bothered to sort out for months. There will be soft toys in absolutely every corner of your home. If you are like me and suffer with OCD, this will push you to the edges of insanity.

5. Then we have the age old conundrum of how do you fold a pushchair down without falling over yourself and nearly chopping your fingers off or half killing yourself? I wish pram makers would just think about the fact this is our first encounter with a pram. Make it simple! Please remember the chances are that we are half asleep trying to do this, because of the lack of sleep.

6. Who would in their right mind ever have thought that catching your child’s projectile vomit was fun? It’s not! It’s disgusting and it smells, and it really does go everywhere. If it was just once that would be ok, but it can go on for hours, sometimes days. Really super fun.

7. Sex before your baby is born means you have all the time in the world to have those beautiful moments of closeness and intimacy that you see in any beautiful love story film. Haha! All gone, oh those odd occasions when you can keep your eyes open for longer than five minutes, it’s a quickie on the sofa, but don’t worry when the kids are 18 it will all return so not long to wait.

We will not try to be to negative about having a baby, because eventually they grow up to be six years old and start answering you back, then at 10 years old they know better. Then they become a teenager and stop talking to you altogether. That bit is actually quite nice haha!

Eventually 18 years later they start to develop into a normal well adjusted human being that you can have a sensible conversation with. Well almost! So actually you think that parenting is quite easy, really I don’t think so! Take a look in the mirror. You are grey, wrinkled and constantly broke.

That’s my joys of parenting. If we were shown a snapshot of what it’s going to be like as parents, would we really become parents? Tough question hey, but amazingly we go on to have more children, look at me I have five children.

Finally on a more serious note all of the above is 100% worth it. To have children is a blessing that so often is taken for granted today. What we must do, I believe is to love and raise our children to be wonderful adults, and cherish all the wonderful memories they will give us. That’s the joys of parenthood.

I would love to hear your thoughts.