Washing up the Right way!

After observing my 15 year old daughter washing up I have discovered that for all these years I have been doing it completely wrong!

No getting stuck in and trying to get the job done in 15 minutes or less, no no no!

First you have to sit there contemplating what music you are going to have playing on your laptop whilst simultaneously chatting to a few friends on Facebook and maybe checking out a few status updates.  This should take anywhere between 10 minutes to half an hour....on a good day even more.  Then you absolutely must check your phone for any messages before popping on your rubber gloves.  Run the water and faff around for 5 minutes putting a few things away and moving various dirty dishes from one side of the kitchen to the other. Take aforementioned rubber gloves off and check your phone again and reply to the mountain of correspondence you have collected in that five minutes. Back on with gloves and wash a few glasses. Glove off and check phone....message?? Then you must reply! If it's a particularly long one then absolutely sit down for a bit and wait for the hilarious reply that will set you grinning at the phone like a recently released mental patient.  Reply to that one and put gloves back on. Get right back to hastily washing a few more pots which you should leave at least 10% of the food on. By this time it's paramount you take those gloves off and check for any messages.  Maybe someone hasn't replied in this time so feel free to make sure you refresh the page just to check the wifi hasn't gone down.  If a reply is needed then crack on and reply! Back to the gloves and now rather lukewarm water.  Start with those pesky pans and when clean (i use this term loosely!) start to pile them haphazardly on top of each other.  You must achieve a jenga like structure that will collapse dangerously if anyone so much as shuts a door down the hallway.  Now it's time to make sure your music is playing to your satisfaction (and check for those messages/statuses) by all means do this earlier if your mother/father tries to sing along loudly or turn off in a huff if preferable, depending on your whim of the moment! Back on with the gloves and swish the last few bits in the bowl (making sure, of course, these last few bits almost defy gravity in the huge stack next to you).  You guessed it...it's time for a quick phone check before spraying down the sides liberally.  Wipe down and then pour away the now ice cold, greasy, lumpy water as of course you just put those plates in the water without scraping any excess food off. Leave the washing up cloths on the edge of a filthy sink (with lots of food mashed into the fibres) and if there isn't quite enough in the way of food scraps blocking the plug hole pop some more in so that the next person to use the sink can have a fulfilling 5 minutes digging around in vomit inducing, greasy water trying to dig it all out so that the bowl doesn't bob around 4 inches higher than it should be.  Your chore is now complete so reward yourself by sitting down and chatting to your friends of Facebook!! 

Living with teens

I have decided that living with teenagers and trying to bring them up isn't a downhill slide. Nor is it an upwardhill struggle...more of a sideways, trying to get a grip of the side of a mountain, epic battle akin to the battle of Hastings or agincourt. The fingernail splitting agony of just trying to hold on to any semblance of normality.  

One minute you are trying to buoy them, as teenager number one is plummeting into a grunting, incomprehensible, hormone induced humour, the next you are trying to put the anchors on number two as they have nauseating dreams of becoming,essentially an all world conquering superpower (of course emotionally funded by the drivel that is X-factor or some other vomit making programme that makes our children think that with a bit of queuing and a brief chat with the likes of Simon Cowell you can become a huge money making star, cue long lecture where parents break the dreams of young people pointing out that the huge amounts of money are made by the likes of Simon Cowell and no one else. Long conversation that deserves an entirely different rant)

The mood swings become legendary and amusing but the toll is taken by the parents.  It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.  Everyone remembers their parents uttering those lines.  Well it's all fun and games until someone loses the use of the Internet.....that one is the new version! 

Internet access and teenageism seems to fall within the same parameters of entitlement that we, as a generation before, held for the tele.  That entitlement that we all felt the right to watch neighbours AND Home and Away and on the weekend, Blind Date and Baywatch!  No such thing as the fancy sky plus then! A Betamax video recorder went a long way to making our ever increasingly intricate lives a bit easier but only if the bastard recorded at the right time without cutting off half the program and to be fair if the programming officials, in all their wisdom, decided to delay said programming for any reason (normally sporting) we were fucked!

But of course trying to explain this to todays teenager will result in the rolling of eyes, a bit of an ill repressed sigh and a poorly written and misspelled ranting status update on Facebook. 

Trying to compete as a parent now, with the empathic support and general disgust at basic parenting rules on such social networks, is distressingly difficult.   The aforementioned troubling teenagers have a disturbingly large amount of friends all urging them to revolt, informing them of their "rights" and generally causing  chaos. What's a mammy to do in the face of such adversity?? The only thing we can do.....embarrassing comments on said Facebook statuses for as long as we are “privileged” enough to be their friends, after that the only way is venting publicly on a blog or through other media.

All is not lost though! I have read recently (in an obviously well respected and renowned for its well researched articles, ahem The Daily Mail) that children, at the age of 23, learn to love their mothers again.  I normally hold judgement on such articles (especially from such respected publications!) but this one I have to hold close to my heart and believe in it's truth or I am on a ride that's pointless and the need for medication to survive it will become insurmountable!