YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING!!

It starts innocently with Play Group, escalates toKinder gym and before you know it years of wallet haemorrhagingtennis lessons go by – and they give it up!!

Next you find yourself at Auskickfrozen solid at 8.00 am on a winter’s morning. You are watching a swarm of identically muddy boys around an invisible ball and you don’t even know which one’s yours. You do this for five years - and then he goes and plays Soccer!

In summer you find yourself watching Cricket and your son doesn’t even get a bowl or scoring cricket and your son goes out for a duck. You don’t even like cricket. Thankfully he gives it up before he – and the game - get real balls.

For her, dance starts at 3 years old and it’s still going. Bizarrely (because dance lessons are just too far away to come and go and come back again) you find yourselfsitting in the Primary school car park for an hour and a half two nights a week (Hoping you won’t be arrested as a suspicious male pervert). This only leads to attending myriad Dance concerts over2 daysevery year for fourteen years - she does win the 10 year medal but shouldn’t that go to dad!

Another night each week, another suburb, another string of performances and another extension on your mortgage and it’s welcome to violin. A half violin, a three quarters violin and finally a full size violin -just in time for her to lose interest and you to lose a few more tuft fulls of hair.

When he’s a teenager Sundays are filled in by soccer matches at places nearly as far away as Liverpool! You don’t know the first thing about soccer. You thought off side was something that happened with your wife when you suggest that she should take him for a changeAnd wouldn’t you know it when he scores for the only time for the seasonyou arerostered to manning the BBQ!.

Now she’s teenaged, she has stars in her eyes. Now you are driving half way across Melbourne to Screen Actorsclassesevery Saturday. Your wallet is now a haemophiliac! And what do you have to show for it? She scores an unpaid extra part in a short that may never be shown and where is it shot? Pascoe Vale of course. As Carl Jung said: The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.

BUT HAVING CHILDREN IS MORE THAN MEMORISING THE MELWAYS

Carole Klein observes, For a woman, a son offers the best chance to know the mysterious male existence.

Yeah likehow hosesoperate – as she cleans the toilet floor.

The unique male way of seeing.He: Where’s my pants? She: On your bed He: Where’s my bed?

BUT THERE’S MORE

Get of the phone!! Log off now. Have you got any homework? Pick up your clothes! Empty the dishwasher! Feed the dog. Go to bed!

Oh unplug your earplugs.

Get of the phone!! Log off now. Have you got any homework? Pick up your clothes!

Empty the dishwasher! Feed the dog. Go to bed!

As Ogden Nashstated: Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, And that's what parents were created for.

AND NOW FOR THE STEAK KNIVES

Peter Ustinov declared:Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

Son: ‘You’re such a nube dad! Can’t you even use a Graphics calculator’ Ouch!

Daughter apoplectic yells: ‘Why don’t you getcounselling mum– you need anger management!’ Double ouch.

It's difficult to decide whether growing pains are something teenagers have - or are.

AND HERE COMES THE MACHETTE

The best substitute for experience is being sixteen,says Raymond Duncan

Daughter again, “Only the most conservative parents in the world wouldn’t let me fly to Newcastle with my boyfriend, stay a month with his jobless, estranged mother who I’ve met onlyonce and who is recovering from an abusive relationship. What’s your problem!” Adolescence is a period of rapid changes. Between the ages of 12 and 17, for example, a parent ages as much as 20 years.

According to Karen Savage,‘Adolescence is perhaps nature's way of preparing parents to welcome the empty nest’. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to happen before 35 these days and as they finally leave they’ll turn and say, “Why didn’t you make us keep up the tennis lessons!”

I kid you not every syllable is true.