Sunday, March 2, 2014

The Inevitables: Children's Milestones that the Parenting Books Forgot

Parenting books are all about chronicling children's milestones. The experts advise on what they are and when to expect them. The doctors break them up into neat and tidy categories: the emotional, the physical and the social. Your child's development outlined in a rather straightforward fashion.

But there are other less celebrated milestones that parents are left to discover on their own. It’s uncanny how universal they are.

To our delight or dismay, every parent on the planet will deal with every child in the world doing one or more of the following with pure and utter abandon. I call them, "The Inevitables of Parenthood":

1) Riding their cat or dog like a horse.

2) Throwing away a cellphone, important piece of mail or remote control.

3) Screaming &@#! in public.

4) Using their head like a wrecking ball.

5) Deciding night is day {never the reverse}.

6) Eating dirt, paper, paint and/or glue.

7) Throwing or otherwise engaging with their own poop.

8) Glomming onto some television show, character and/or song that you find abhorrent.

9) Ensconcing themselves in toilet paper.

10) Kicking their father in the balls.

11) Dining on pet food.

12) Sticking a small object so far into an orifice as to render it unretrievable without professional know-how.

13) Doing any or all of these things repeatedly, despite your best efforts to cajole, plead, order, admonish and/or otherwise deter them.

If you’re a parent and these things haven’t happened to you yet, be warned, they are inevitable. Your
milestones
response is inevitable too. It will likely be similar to other parents who have gone before you. Of course, the amplitude of your child's behavior and your own mood will determine the quality of your response too. But, on a good day (or if you're in pubic), you will laugh. On a bad day, you will scream, curse or cry to the heavens above. Either way, your encounter with one of life's inevitables will pass and you will carry on.

If, on that day, you happen to find yourself in a particularly philosophical mood, you just might be able to rationalize that you are getting in some good training for the inevitables of the teenage years...

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Photo Source: Paul Mayne, Flickr This photo has been altered, and it's use does not suggest that the licenser endorses me, it's use or this blog. License

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12 comments:

  1. This was hilarious, and so true! I especially agree with #8 - I can't stand the Teletubbies!

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  2. LOL! There should be an alternative baby book for these things. Maybe they're not included because no one says, "Ah, I remember the first time little Johnny at dog food for dinner." lol!

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  3. Nodding my head for everything but #12 (knock on wood!).

    My youngest tossed a remote control down a heater vent space (the vent was removed for painting). That was fun.

    My nephew (he's grown now) used to throw things out of the moving car window while I was driving. I finally started leaving the stuff instead of going back. The throwing stopped. I was young...today I'd have prolly not gone back for even item #1. ;)

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  4. This post brings back some nice memories when my oldest son was a toddler. He loved to make a mess whether it was dumping soap or shampoo onto the carpet, throwing the cordless phone into the toilet, and climbing the cabinets like a monkey. I think they leave this out on purpose so that we continue to have children.

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  5. HAHA this is awesome, Rachel! And so true. My son has done pretty much everything on this list but we haven't yet had to go to the doctor to get anything removed (yet). He's ruined two remote controls, dropped my phone and uses toilet paper from everything from becoming a mummy to making roads for his hot wheels to drive on. Love this!!!

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  6. Luckily, I didn't have to deal with any objects getting lodged in an orifice. Although every other milestones were crossed successfully (or unsuccessfully, depending on how you look at it). Now that my daughter is almost 20, I think I'm safe now. Whew!

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  7. Oh, yes, we could fill a book with these…. I would add coloring on walls, ripping pages out of books… so many!

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  8. HA! this made me laugh! so true :) http://www.handmadeintheheartland.com/

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  9. They can't put these things in the baby book....the element of surprise is crucial. Lol! I ran down your list and have experienced #s 1,3,5,6,7,8,10 and 13. Fun stuff, all of it...

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  10. Uhm, hi. My name is Jen. And my son is a crayonaholic.
    Yes, he is 8 and every once in a blue moon he still eats a crayon. He claims he can't help it because they smell so good.
    So there's that.

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