Pass the Sick Bag

Cutesy Pie Stunts That You Once Thought Were Infuriatingly Naff But That You Will Indulge in Unashamedly After the Birth of Your Child

1. Mother’s/Father’s Day/birthday/Christmas/etc. cards written on behalf of a child whose vocabulary consists solely of the word “Ak”. (See earlier post.)

2. Writing letters/emails on behalf of your child starting with the line, “My daddy is typing this so please forgive his spelling…”

3. Captioning photographs of your child and sending them to friends/relatives. You will laugh your own socks off at your wit. But in truth, the captions will be no funnier than the old “You Don’t Have to be Mad to Work Here… But it Helps!!” posters.

4. You will make your friends pose for pics with baby, forgetting completely how much you once hated being handed such parcels of jobbies and sick and how the forced smile gave you a pain behind the eyes.

5. You will purchase scandalously over-priced hats adorned with cute animal ears for your child to wear. For this last, you should be truly ashamed of yourself. And somewhere I AM ashamed of myself. But not ashamed enough to stop buying, and making her wear, the hat.

6. You will make a DVD-slide show of pictures of all your friends visiting the infant. You will chose Paul McCartney’s Let ‘Em In (that’s the one that goes “Someone’s knockin’ at the door/Someone’s ringing the bell”) as the soundtrack. Somewhere in the sleep-deprived recesses of your rational mind you know that this is neither funny nor cute. But like a brainwashed patsy from some bad sci-fi flick, you will be unable to stop.

The worst thing of all is that you will have lost the ability to spot this because your child is involved and your child is the greatest event the world has ever known, more important even than reversing climate change. You will do well to remember this when you are bemoaning the fact that nobody visits you anymore.