Motherhood 101: What not to do

What Not To Do:

1) Do not make cleaner with your children awake and watching. If you do choose to make cleaner with your children up and watching, do not let Cowen shake the bottle because it might cause a small droplet or two to fly into Miriam's eye and cause severe irritation of the eye and much screaming of the child. The screaming will probably cause you to call Poison Control, and they will most likely tell you to put your child in the bathtub and wash out the eye for 15 minutes. Aiming a showerhead spewing water (gently) at your daughter's face will probably cause your daughter to get hysterical. That's not all bad as the tears will help get rid of the vinegar/lemongrass oil that is plaguing her eye. After a few minutes your daughter will probably calm down enough to drive you nuts by moving her head around to get water in her mouth instead of her eye. Although making cleaner while your children are awake is a bad idea, your children will most likely live.

2) Do not sleep in. This is a cardinal rule. Do not let your husband convince you to watch a movie because he finished his last final thus keeping you up late. Then do not let him convince you to do other things that keep you up even later. Because if you do those things and stay up later, you will probably want to sleep in. If you sleep in you might wake up to find that Cowen climbed up on the counter and dug around behind several large containers in the cupboard and pulled out your food dye. If Cowen gets into the food dye you might find food dye all over the kitchen floor, the walls, the hallway carpet and Eli's entire body. This is extremely unpleasant and might cause you to have a small hernia and spend an hour cleaning.

3) Do not clean the bathroom while your children are coloring at the table. If you do, you might finish the bathroom to find pencil shavings from one end of the house to the other because Cowen wanted to figure out how to empty the sharpener.

4) Do not be lazy about replacing the plastic covering on the bed despite changing the sheets on at least two beds daily. If some children manage to pull off the plastic covering without unmaking the rest of the bed (still baffled) do not ignore the plastic sheet thinking that your 3 year old wears a diaper to bed and you'll fix it later. If you do, you might find yourself the next morning scrubbing the mattress because said child's nasty, pooey diaper leaked all over the place.

5) DO be lazy in potty-training. In fact, I recommend never actually attempting it. Unless, of course, you want to spend an hour scrubbing an entire carpeted bedroom floor of the watery poo all over it. Since I don't know if the poo came from the 3 year old or the 6 year old, suffice it to say that all children should wear diapers until they are 18. Or move out. Whichever comes first.

6) Do not reproduce and have a male child. Male children do things like pee constantly in the garbage right next to the toilet. They also take apart the bookshelf that holds their clothes and destroy it. For no good reason. They also spray a whole bottle of stain remover on their brand-new bedroom carpet thereby bleaching the brand-new carpet. Young male humans are destructive mammals that cannot be house-trained. Try for female offspring. Or none at all. That's really the wisest course.