Assvice for the week.

Do not give your toddler a chocolate truffle and let her eat it unsupervised. Just because she normally eats chocolate in an instant doesn’t mean she will this time. In fact, chocolate truffles make pretty awesome body paint.

Don’t try and ice Lamingtons with a toddler sitting at the other side of the bench. You will end up with chocolate icing and coconut all over the house. Chocolate icing also makes pretty awesome body paint.

Don’t expect a teenage boy to be able to wash his hands free of chocolate without covering everything in the bathroom with chocolate speckles. Shower, bathtub, window, wall, mirror, cot mattress -don’t ask-, and floor. All speckley. Pity it wasn’t food colouring, it would have been prettier than brown specks.

If you let your partner put the toddler in the bathrub unsupervised, don’t expect your shampoo to have been removed from the bathtub first. Do expect a pretty smelling toddler and another trip to the supermarket.

Don’t overheat your chocolate. It WILL seize and even when you fix (add cream) it you won’t be able to use it for coating peppermint creams.

If you need to make a lemon meringue pie for Christmas lunch, make sure you have access to a pie dish first. Do not keep forgetting to grab said dish from your mother until it is the very last minute (today) and you need to beg her nicely to drop it around. Also, ask for some cream to fix the stupid chocolate.

Your first loaf of bread using new wholemeal flour will fail. Don’t ask why, just accept it and make another one.

Don’t expect all the Christmas decorations to stay on the tree. Your toddler will pull the tinsel off and run with it until the tree almost falls over. You will fix this by simply draping the hanging loop back up around the top. By the time you do this 10000 times you won’t care what the tree looks like.

If you are heavily pregnant, your toddler will want to spend all her time squashing your belly. Trying to stop her is useless, just go with it. You might be able to breathe again one day.

No matter how sick of being pregnant you are, the chances are good that you will carry to your due date. If prior pregnancies (well, pregnancy) are anything to go by, you will carry past your due date. Stop wishing for labour to begin and suck it up. Do you really want a Christmas baby anyway?

If your 36 week mark falls in the middle of the holiday season, do not expect to be seen for a 36w doctors check until you are past 37 weeks. Content yourself with the fact that it isn’t your fault all the stupid doctors are on holidays too and therefore they can’t complain when you are being seen late.

Any stress you save by not buying Christmas gifts comes back to haunt you when you have TWO days left to get everything cooked and coated and baked and made. However, you can still maintain that the cooking is more fun.

If you spend all day on your feet cooking, the baby WILL drop down into your pelvis and gift you with a very sexy pregnancy waddle. This will also be the day that your partner will have to work incredibly late and will therefore be unable to help with the accompanying backache. Suck it up. The baby will rise back up again over night leaving you unable to breathe and no closer to birthing. Again: Suck it up.

The later your toddler falls asleep, the earlier they will wake up. Fact of life. Do not try arguing with the sun to make it go down earlier and rise later. You can however curse summertime as much as you like. (last light: 9.30pm – first light: 4.56am)

The more tired your toddler is, the more needy they will be and the less likely it is that you will be able to get anything done or breathe.

And finally, there are only 2 days until Christmas.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Also, Happy Hanukkah and Happy Holidays to everyone who doesn’t celebrate the way we do. I hope you have a fantastic time.

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