Kids - who needs 'em?

It’s been an odd week in the Bad Mutha household.

DD1 has been away for a five day long school trip to the Isle of Wight.

When we turned up to wave her and all her other Year Six pals off on Monday morning, DP and I couldn’t believe how wussy the other parents were being.

You’d think the kids were all World War Two evacuees being sent off Lord knows where for six or seven years the way some folk were bawling.

The kids themselves were much more mature about it. But that’s probably because all they were concerned about was who they were going to “get off” with at the disco on the Thursday night. Hmm.

DD1 has a chum whose mum couldn’t think what she was going to do all week without her precious child to look after.

“It’ll be like a morgue in our house,” she moaned.

Funny thing was when DP and I suggested she had our psycho toddler for a couple of days to quell the endless boredom, she wasn’t at all keen.

You see, if we’d found ourselves in a position where we had no kids to look after for nearly a week, you wouldn’t have seen us for dust.

It would have been Pimms O’Clock followed by a quick Google to book one of those “couples only” breaks at a snobby hotel before you could say: “Kids - who needs em?”

Some folk just have no idea how to have fun.

Anyway, don’t get me wrong, we are looking forward to seeing DD1 again when she arrives home tonight.

Mainly because we’re dying to know who she DID get off with...

Parenting - it's not rocket science, is it?

Blokes are useless when it comes to looking after small kids aren’t they?
Oh, don’t get me wrong, DP does more than his fair share and all that.
But, despite the fact that he’s run his own successful business for nearly 20 years, he can’t seem to manage DD2 properly at all.
Our child-minder has, at great inconvenience to us, been off on holiday for the last two weeks.
So DP has had two days in a row both this week and last with just him and the 14-month-old terror.
Talk about total chaos.
Food sprawled across the walls, toys everywhere, valuable paperwork ripped to shreds...
And then there’s the weird outfits he’s been dressing her in. He got some awful strange looks at toddler group, apparently.
But the worst thing is his haphazard attitude to sleep time. Which, as every Bad Mutha knows, is the most important part of the day. Mainly because it’s when you can watch the telly in peace, have 40 winks yourself or go online shopping.
I came home from work at about 5.30pm the other afternoon to find DD2 just getting up after her two hour “lunchtime” nap.
So when we tried to put her to bed at 7pm she was having none of that.
I pointed out to DP that maybe he should have considered putting the baby to bed a little earlier for her lunchtime sleep. Like, you know, at lunchtime.
He then went off in a huff for a walk with DD2 until 9.30pm.
Obviously, they ended up in the boozer. And came back making a racket right in the middle of the final of The Apprentice. Sacrilege.
The next evening, I came home at 5.30pm again to find DD2 doing her best impression of that girl from The Exorcist while DP looked like he was about to have a nervous breakdown.
"She could be tired," I ventured. "When did you put her down for a nap today?"
"Oh she's not had a nap at all. I thought you'd just get mad again if she did," he moaned.
Yep. Blardy useless.