Pointless

"Parenting," you often hear parents say,  "is a thankless task." Parents often say stupid things, such as;

"How many times have I told you not to do that?"

"What's that sock doing on the floor? "

And my personal favourite;

"Do you want to tidy your room?"

Of course parenting is thankless. You're looking after psychotic egomaniacs. And now, in the spirit of gleeful hypocrisy, here's what drives me batshit nutty bonkers.

Ironing

No one in the history of humankind has ever reached the end of their life and said;

"I may not have lead an interesting life. I may not have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but I'm glad I did all that ironing. "

And when it  comes to kid's clothes you can bet your arse you've entered a world of futility. The scientific definition of a femtosecond is the time between a six year old putting on a perfectly ironed school shirt and it looking like it's been fed to a giraffe.

"The" Instead of "Fuh"

Childhood speech impediments can be very sweet. For instance the Boy said "Ephalent" instead of Elephant for years and I never got bored of it. I still occasionally say "Par cark" instead car park, and chicks really dig that.

However, the Girl is made of nails and pig iron, and as such her speech impediment is more... robust. She has proved completely impervious to any attempt to convince her to say "the" instead of "fuh". Mostly this gives her a bit of a Basildon twang, the sort you hear from seventeen year old women pushing their six children in a single pram whilst they take their pit bull for a walk to the tattoo parlour.

However, on occasion it causes fairly dramatic misunderstandings. Such as when she was regaling my mum with the story of when she saw a man dressed as Scooby Doo queueing to board an EasyJet flight.

"I saw Scooby Doo! "

"Really? Where? "

"Fuh queue!"

Hair

Washing hair is a bit of a chore. At one point the Girl had hair about the length you normally see on a concert cellist. It was so long you had to erect scaffolding before you could start to wash it. So it took about forty five minutes to wash, condition, comb and dry. And since I'm a man, whenever I try to plait her hair she ends up looking like a scarecrow. As for the Boy, regardless of how we cut his hair I'm unable to dry it without making him look like Hitler. Bath night in our house generally resembles a rather dark version of the Wizard of Oz.

Batteries

Everything these days takes batteries. The Boy got a wooden train set for Christmas one year and even that took batteries. And they never take standard size batteries, they all take tiny ones with serial numbers for names that you can only buy from specialist retailers and which cost the soul of your first born child.

We invested in rechargeable batteries, which saves a fair amount of money but comes with the disadvantage of having to hold a "battery amnesty" every two weeks to charge the bloody things up. This involves opening every single toy, normally with a screwdriver. Because if you don't, creepy shit happens. We were bought a musical table (yes, you read that right) that, when the batteries were low, would suddenly switch itself on and play music eerily out of key. Usually at three in the morning. Which meant I'd wake up thinking Freddy Kruger was coming for me.

Monopoly

I'm not a fan of board games, but Monopoly holds a special place on my mantelpiece of hate. Aside from the fact that you win the game by aggressive land purchases and uncompromising rental contracts (and if that doesn't scream fun for all the family I don't know what does) there's the fact that the result is normally a forgone conclusion within twenty minutes but you're forced to grind on with the game for another four hours. Even the "quick" version takes at least two hours. That's not a game, that's a job.

But mostly I don't like it because I've never won, regardless of how hard I try. In the past week I've played the Boy twice. He beat me both times. I cheated the second time and kept stealing money from the bank when he wasn't looking (I'm not proud). He still beat me. When we finished he slapped his forehead and said;

"Oh, man. I was trying to let you win. "

So I got the Girl to tell him where she saw Scooby Doo.