Parenting Manuals And New-Old Reads

I’ve laboured under the illusion this past six years that my first parenting book was the old classic What To Expect When You’re Expecting (though I really with they’d thought of calling it Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway)

It was purchased in the basement of Easons one morning on the way to work in 2009 and it should have come wrapped in a discreet brown paper bag. I was about five seconds pregnant, like 95% of its’ purchasers and terrified that anyone would know. I dipped in and out of that book all through pregnancy number one (and completely ignored it second time around).

This weekend I foraged in my sisters house for some new books for our burgeoning reader Dominic. As my eldest sibling and bearer of the oldest cousins she has the family library archives in her attic. I quickly discovered that I had owned what seems like a useful manual way for this stage in my life way earlier than I remembered…

L-R: Ted, Dominic…

By the way, the dreadful children are most definitely Irish – Pat, Maureen & Biddy Taggerty are the ruffians in question. I’ll let you know but I’m pretty sure they’ll all end up having jolly good fun and drinking lemonade with the prim and proper neighbours by the end. This bit of retro-revision for me aside, as well as some old Ladybird readers, I got him a few Secret Seven adventure books for us to get stuck into together. That lot have got to be better the last little fecker I returned to the library; Horrid Henry. As long as I can scan the page ahead fast enough to edit out any casual racism of these old editions we’ll be fine. Cheers for that Enid.