Aint That The Truth!!

This is something a good friend of mine from our Rainbow Land Play Time Family Group in Adelaide, Australia wrote and shared with her friends on Facebook. She has given me permission to publish it here so I can share it with everyone. I love it and I hope you do to. Thanks Nell.....

This holiday I have put Jirah in OSCH (holiday care) to help Garth recover from his heart surgery. Something I found fascinating is that you MUST send your child to care with a drink, however it cannot be juice, energy drinks, milk products, or cordial. Frankly I have just ignored them sending her with lime cordial and weathered their disapproving stares of a morning. Jirah is apparently berated daily for this misdemenour.Its funny isn't it? When I grew up cordial was certainly the drink of choice. Sometime in the eighties cordial became discouraged and blamed for hyperactivity and became instead replaced with juice as the drink of choice. In the nineties some bright spark suddenly discovered juice was loaded with fruit sugars (along with lots of vitamins and good things) and energy drinks became the "healthy" drink of choice - loaded with salt these drinks help to rehydrate! But no - in the naughties our drink companies became a little over enthusiastic and started loading energy drinks with caffeine to...well... aid with the energy component. Rightly so, another bright spark (or perhaps the same one) decided that caffeine and salt probably werent a great component for a nation with the highest incidence of heart disease.

I believe we are currently waiting for the 'new' drink - green tea with its antioxidants made an attempt but people just couldnt quite be fooled into thinking that a nine year old would find it consumable.So what are we left with? Well...water...obviously. So tell me, when water is available from every tap and water fountain why I need to actually pack a drink for my child? Ahh yes - thats right... (I hear the whispers of the parenting auditors) I should actually pay someone to package up tap water for me, put pictures of some glorious mountain stream on the front and then send her to OSCH with that. Parenting is all about guilt. Well its not really. Or at least it shouldnt be. But from the moment that tiny spark of life begins within your womb you are bombarded with what you 'should' and 'shouldnt' do. If anything goes wrong, then it must have been your fault somehow rather than some cosmic roll of the dice. When Jirah was born the nurses would not let me bath her. Apparently some bright spark had discovered that it was good for their skin to be covered in bloody afterbirth for days and it was wrong, oh so wrong, to wash her in evil soap as soon as she got here! What was I thinking?. Yet only three years later, as soon as Zech was dutifully slapped and uttered his first surprised yelp of indignation he was immediately ushered off for his first bath. (Thank God!).I am getting old and cynical and I am reminded of the words of Solomon - "There is nothing new under the sun - all is folly". Aint it just? Life just keeps going round and round. What happens once happens again. What is trendy today will be oh so yesterday tomorrow. Its just so hard to enjoy parenting when you are feeling guilty all the time. So screw societies trends. Up yours to the parenting auditors. I prefer to enjoy my children and do what "I" think is right. Got a problem with that?

Lets face it... by the time they are sixteen (give or take a few years) they will hate us anyway and decide that we were evil and out to make their lives difficult. And by the time they are thirty and have their own bundle of joy they will have re-created history yet again as they struggle with what drink to give their children.Vanity...all is vanity... I finally get it. Its because... we care.