Taking aim

What is the skill which a mum must acquire in order to cope with her daily life?

Cooking and baking? Homemaking? Sewing? No.

Aiming.

It starts with infants. First you have to aim the breast at the baby's mouth. Now some babies are voracious, but others have to be coaxed into feeding. So there you go, moving 'it' around hoping to hit the target. However that's not much of an issue, because once the baby is latched s/he stays like that, until you change breast.

The real challenge is spoon feeding a baby. By then you have to be an expert at aiming. From 6 months onwards, babies become CMO (constantly moving objects). So you have your CMO in the highchair, and your plate of soup. The scope is to insert soup in the CMO's mouth. By the time the spoon reaches the target, half of the soup in the spoon has flown off, and of the half which you manage to put in CMO's mouth, comes out again. You scoop it back, and try to feed CMO. Again half of it flies off... So you spend an hour feeding the baby, who practically has eaten nothing! On the other hand clothes and highchair have had there fair share. Wouldn't it have been much easier if babies had a sort of lid at the top of their head, which you could lift up, empty plate contents and close down again?

Baby Emma with pasta all over her face.

By the time they're toddlers you have to be at an Olympian level at aiming, when it comes to dressing them up. Would any child expert please explain why kids flee at the sight of items of clothing? After bath, or before going out it's ALWAYS the same story. They run like the wind. Once the information that this is not the time for playing chasey have been given, and the threats of not going out have been issued, they do come. However the baby previously known as the CMO has now turned into a CMO to the power of hundred, because s/he is a toddler. The most difficult thing to put on are trousers, because they can't keep their balance when they are still, let alone when they are going at 100vibrations/second! It's a little like rodeo.

Children on the other hand, seem to be born with an innate gift of aiming. Want proof? I've got plenty of them. Baby burps on my best shirt. Baby pee in my face. Toddler throwing up in my hair. Numerous hits in my eye, nose and teeth. Shattered vases, spilt milk, juice, tea...Think I'll enroll them for taking aim, before this gift wears off!