25 Things On My Parenting Bucket List

Some people want to swim naked with crocodiles or tandem skydive from a jumbo jet or bungee jump from a skyscraper before they kick the proverbial bucket. However, for a parent of a small person these things are probably on the back burner at the moment!

My bucket list includes things I would like to achieve before our toddler reaches school age. They are less dramatic, but no less unlikely to ever occur. They are as follows, in no particular order:

• Get through a meal time during which more food ends up in his mouth than on his clothes/on the table/on the carpet
• Leave a children’s play area without having to drag toddler away, kicking and screaming, like a farmer wrestling an agitated goat or trying to catch an oily squirrel
• Experience an entire day without having to pretend to eat plastic food or drink pretend tea from a plastic teacup
• Enjoy a relaxing beach holiday with cocktails and a pool, or just any relaxing holiday, anywhere, ever. Or even just do anything relaxing whatsoever for more than five minutes
• Take a piss without being watched and commented upon.

‘Daddy, that’s your willy’

• Convince little one to wear a hat or hood in sub zero temperatures
• Convince little one to wear a sun hat in blazing sunshine
• Enjoy food without having to donate a decent portion of it to little one, or hide in a cupboard to avoid detection, like a slightly tedious burglar
• From the time of toddler entry, keep living room tidy for more than 20 minutes (being able to actually see more than 25 percent of the floor would be acceptable)
• Living an entire day without seeing Peppa Pig, Blaze, Ryder, or that annoying cowbag Dora as I already know every word of every episode
• Going shopping and actually buying what I intended to buy rather than chasing little one around the store and buying whatever is closest to me out of desperation
• Put up Christmas decorations without them being prodded, fondled, crushed, pulled apart, or destroyed
• Go through a day without personally being prodded, fondled, crushed, pulled apart, or destroyed
• Take little one to see a human dressed up as one of his favourite TV characters without him screaming and running away as if being approached by an axe wielding, skinless, 4-headed demon
• Do a few DIY projects without toddler attempting to screw and/or saw things with real life sharp tools
• Spend less than three hours per day pushing toy cars around the floor
• Calling my other half something other than ‘Mummy’ and my own mum something other than ‘Nanny’
• Go clothes shopping for me and actually purchase something other than toddler clothes because they all look sooooooooooo adorable
• Eat in a restaurant in a calm, enjoyable fashion, rather than throwing as much food as possible down my throat between sprints after little one as he runs off toward open fires and doors
• Enjoy a day where little one doesn’t randomly insert the word ‘poo’ at least 300 times into sentences
• Say ‘Careful, son!’ fewer than 50 times per hour, all day, every day with varying levels of success
• Wake up when my body tells me to instead of to the sounds of ‘DADDY, MY BUM NEEDS CHECKING!!!’ x 100
• Give him exactly what he has requested for his dinner without him then reacting to it as if I had plonked a steaming turd in front of him
• Have enough free time to complete a list of 25 things without giving up at 24…

I know it’s unlikely that most of us parents will ever achieve these stretching goals, but if we all reach for the moon, we may just reach a star one day!

What’s on your parenting bucket list? And what are the chances you’ll ever achieve it?