Extreme parenting – motherhood doesn’t get much tougher than this

Children: It’s downhill from here

If I could be bothered with video it would show my shiny face shouting into the camera and lots of zoomy, angled shots to try to create excitement where there is none.

But I can’t, so tough.

I thought I might share my current parenting challenges and some possible solutions.

Move along there if you’ve got urgent sock drawers to sort out.

Hand hygiene

I know that a dollop dirt is supposed to be a good thing, but Boy Two takes it too far. He’s a manky little article who will go to unreasonable lengths to avoid the soap. The best solution I can offer is to grab him and scrawl something embarrassing – preferably in pink – on his hands.

Toilet training

Trying to do something about Boy Three’s persistent feral behaviour is proving testing. The other day he had managed to piss all over my Karma long before breakfast time. Thing is, he manages to be clean and dry at nursery for the nursery ladies but at home it’s a different story. Sometimes he bothers, when the bribe is big enough – but most of the time he doesn’t. Occasionally he even gets creative and political – think H Block in the 1970s.

Discipline

Supernanny moots the idea of a certain amount of time on a naughty step appropriate to child and crime. I now can’t remember what he had done, but Boy Three was dispatched to the naughty step to think about things. A few minutes later – slightly disconcerted by the lack of bellowing – I called him back. He skipped into the room crowing that he had, in fact, been on the step above the naughty step the whole time.

Compartmentalisation

Boy One – he the Aspie – has a school compartment and a home compartment and doesn’t want to mix the two. Much like the way he can’t mix his beans and his fish fingers. I tried quite hard to find out what was going on at school, but mostly he didn’t want to tell me. I sneak a look at his school diary, but his handwriting is spidery I didn’t learn much. So I decided that if something was wrong, I’d hear about it and left him in peace. However, at parents’ evening I collected several looks of horror and am probably under discussion in the staff room for not having a clue what my boy does at school.

Conflict resolution

What would M Poppins do? The biggest dispute of Sunday began when Boy Three chucked a turd at Boy Two. Fortunately he’s a bad shot and a crap makes an ungainly missile. On the upside, he might have paid attention to my instruction not to poo on the floor by catching it in his hand.

And to think I’m supposed to be considering writing a book on the subject of parenting…