5 Crap Things About Your Kids Growing Up

5. No more drinking at weekends. One of life's little joys for the working masses is to be able to chillax at the end of the working week. Not so when your kids reach their teens. There's always something on that either needs you to stay sober that night (Sleeepppooovveeerrr!) or you to drive the next day (Hobbies, trips to the shops, picking up from friends sleepovers etc etc). Any alcohol either at home or in the pub is a bad idea, you've always got to be on call (Yes, you really are still over the limit the next day after your bottles of wine!). Instead of drinking on a Friday or Saturday you'll switch to odd nights out during the week (when of course there is no other fucker out and everywhere shuts early) and let work cop the hangover the next day. On the rare occasion you do get out at the weekend gate fever takes over and 2 hours in you're so fucked up you can barely string 3 words together. The end result of this is total separation from your weekend drinking friends who you grew up with. Like taxes and death, this is inevitable.

4. The bathroom. Forget about ever having anymore time in the bathroom than it takes to have a quick shit or an in-and-out shower. If they're not camped in there for hours on end you can be sure that one of their friends will be. Not so bad if you have a couple of bathrooms but when you are poor like us it comes down to military precision to find time for a relaxing dump.

3. Finding the right group. As they get older it becomes more and more likely that the friends they have will have some influence over them in later life. Kids go from being friends with everybody in their class to finding themselves a nice group. On one hand you don't want your kids in the overly restricted "parents won't let them out of their site" freaks group, nor do you want them in the chavvy as fuck, out drinking every night, pregnant by 16 scummers. There are a whole variety of "normal" groups in-between but the likely hood is you'll find yourself aiming for one of the upper end groups and doing a lot more housework (what weekends) and a hell of a lot of running around.

2. Forget Facebook. Not an entirely bad thing this anyway but it runs much deeper than just Facebook. Everybody knows that parents have duel personalities, the person they really are and the person they choose for their kids to see. As the kids get older they want to use Facebook and before you know it, bham, you've got a friend request from your sprogs. Accept it and at this point forget ever being able to be yourself online again (well until they hit 18 and piss off). You are now a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 100% accountable for everything you post, everybody you friend, every comment you pass parent. You stop being Fred Smith to your mates and start being little Timmy's dad. This is not helped by those weird fuckers that insist on tagging photos of your kids as you! Twats.

1. Sleepovers. I can't trawl deep enough through the bowels of my stomach to put into words just how fucking much I hate the continuing insistence on fucking sleepovers. What was once a rare treat is now seen as a every fucking spare* weekend must have. Anybody else notice the numbers growing as well? It started of as having a friend to sleep and it just seems to grow and grow until they can't fit in the bedroom and take over the whole of downstairs. If there's not a gang coming around your house (which requires at least 1 day of cleaning, for girls anyway) you'll get to spend the weekend running yours around and then having to put up with the monged child which results from the fook all sleep kids get at sleepovers. I'm not even going into the expense of providing suitable meal options to suite everybody's tastes, well you can't have them having cereal for breakfast like what you do 99% of the time? I honestly just can't understand it, my parents would of quite rightly told me to piss off if I insisted on having friends sleeping all the time, especially when those same friends are ONLY seen at sleepovers. It's not even like the kids spend any time with each other when they're not sleeping at each others houses.

*spare means no kids hobbies on, not spare as in you might get some time to yourself.

Now I should probably counter all this by saying you do get the joy of watching your children developing on into the people they are really going to be, the sense of humour, the kindness, the sheer joy of watching them grow up. But balls to it, after yet another 48 hour clean up, totally dry and sleepover ridden weekend I can't bring myself to see the bright side :)