Sacrifices No One Tells You About

When you’re having a baby everyone tells you that you will swap your wild party days for takeaways and DVDs. Your glorious 10 hours a night kip with long hazy weekend lie ins will swiftly become broken beyond all recognition and replaced with you learning the art of surviving the day on 54 minutes sleep. You’ll swap your 5inch stilettos for a pair of sturdy sensible winter boots and you can certainly kiss goodbye to bikinis (shudder) But these things are pretty obvious. Here’s my list of sacrifices no one warned you about…

1) You start choosing 2 in 1 shampoo because you don’t have the luxury of time to shampoo AND condition

2) You start using glitter or crackle nail varnish on battered bitten off nails that can’t scratch your babies eyes out. This is to help shield the fact that your nails desperately need redoing and as it looks so rubbish anyway no one will notice!

3) You accept your hair au naturelle. I swore to God in my early 20s after the life changing discovery of GHDs I would never force my natural hair on the world.
Then I had twins. And if I leave the house with dry hair it’s a miracle! Sorry world – I am the new Wurzel Gummage.

4) You swap the gym for at home dvd workouts. Who has the time, money and energy to go to a gym?! I can’t imagine asking someone to babysit so I could sweat my arse off for an hour. Precious babysitters are reserved for when you go out eating and drinking.

5) You will never watch any daytime TV again. When I say no daytime tv this doesn’t relate to Cbeebies or Nick Jr. That will be on from dawn to dusk. You and your beloved trash tv schedule do not get a look in.

6) Skinny jeans become leggings. Why? Two words – JELLY BELLY.
 

7) Coffee dates now become soft play hell dates where you referee everyone else’s brats children and never say more than 11 words to your friends as you’re constantly dashing off to stop your child somersaulting onto another unsuspecting child.

8) You can throw away all your bathroom lotions and potions – cleanse, tone, moisturise, face pack and night creams HA! – you’ll be lucky if you can rub a baby wipe over your face in the morning.

9) You will scrutinise, discuss and analyse at length your baby’s bowel movements in great length over the dinner table whilst eating chicken korma and not even bat an eyelid.

10) You will never be on time ever again as someone will always puke / have a tantrum / do a sneaky poo in the hallway as you’re about to leave

11) Your living room resembles Smyths toy store. You can buy as many storage boxes/storage units as you like. You can even be all fancy and have a playroom but I hand on heart guarantee you that they will infiltrate all your attempts and you will find the Ninky Nonk poking out from the sofa cushion.

12) You can kiss goodbye to magnolia walls, cream carpets and high white gloss furniture. Everything needs to be pine as this hides dust, dirt and general filth. Not very modern shabby chic eh?

13) You develop weird crushes on kids tv presenters. Mr Bloom, Mr Maker, Alex and Andy off Cbeebies? Ok I’ll let you have them. But the second Tumble comes into the lust-ful equation – seek professional help.

B xx