[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]T[/dropcap]est 1 – Preparation
Women: To prepare for pregnancy:
1. Put on a dressing gown and stick a beanbag down the front.
2. Leave it there.
3. After 9 months remove 5% of the beans.
To prepare for children:
1. Go to a local chemist, tip the contents of your wallet onto the counter and tell the pharmacist to help himself.
2. Go to the supermarket. Arrange to have your salary paid directly to their head office.
3. Go home. Pick up the newspaper and read it for the last time.
Test 2 – Knowledge
Find a couple who are already parents and berate them about their methods of discipline, lack of patience, appallingly low tolerance levels and how they have allowed their children to run wild.
Suggest ways in which they might improve their child’s sleeping habits, toilet training, table manners and overall behaviour.
Enjoy it. It will be the last time in your life that you will have all the answers.
Test 3 – Nights
To discover how nights will feel:
1. Walk around the living room from 5pm to 10pm carrying a wet bag weighing approximately 4 – 6kg, with a radio turned to static (or some other obnoxious sound) playing loudly.
2. At 10pm, put the bag down, set the alarm for midnight and go to sleep.
3. Get up at 11pm and walk the bag around the living room until 1am.
4. Set the alarm for 3am.
5. As you can’t get back to sleep, get up at 2am and make a cup of tea.
6. Go to bed at 2.45am.
7. Get up again at 3am when the alarm goes off.
8. Sing songs in the dark until 4am.
9. Put the alarm on for 5am. Get up when it goes off.
10. Make breakfast.
Keep this up for 5 years. LOOK CHEERFUL.
Test 4 – Dressing Small Children
1. Buy a live octopus and a string bag.
2. Attempt to put the octopus into the string bag so that no arms hang out.
Time Allowed: 5 minutes.
Test 5 – Cars
1. Forget the BMW. Buy a practical 5-door wagon.
2. Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment. Leave it there.
3. Get a coin. Insert it into the CD player.
4. Take a box of chocolate biscuits; mash them into the back seat.
5. Run a garden rake along both sides of the car.
Test 6 – Going For a Walk
Wait.
Go out the front door.
Come back in again.
Go out.
Come back in again.
Go out again.
Walk down the front path.
Walk back up it.
Walk down it again.
Walk very slowly down the road for five minutes.
Stop, inspect minutely and ask at least six questions about every piece of used chewing gum, dirty tissue and dead insect along the way.
Retrace your steps.
Scream that you have had as much as you can stand until the neighbours come out and stare at you.
Give up and go back into the house.
You are now just about ready to try taking a small child for a walk.
Test 7 – Communication
Repeat everything you say at least five times.
Test 8 – Grocery Shopping
1. Go to the local supermarket. Take with you the nearest thing you can find to a pre-school child – a fully grown goat is excellent. If you intend to have more than one child, take more than one goat.
2. Buy your weekly groceries without letting the goat(s) out of your sight.
3. Pay for everything the goat eats or destroys.
Until you can easily accomplish this, do not even contemplate having children.
Test 9 – Feeding a 1 year-old
1. Hollow out a melon
2. Make a small hole in the side
3. Suspend the melon from the ceiling and swing it side to side
4. Take a bowl of soggy cornflakes and attempt to spoon them into the swaying melon whilst pretending to be an aeroplane.
5. Continue until half the cornflakes are gone.
6. Tip the rest into your lap.
Test 10 – TV
1. Learn the names of every character from the Wiggles.
2. Watch nothing else on television for at least five years.
Test 11 – Sex life
1. You and your partner try to sleep a night at the nearest train station.
2. Try to have sex in the morning without anybody noticing.
You are now ready to have children.
