I am sure that after today Wife and I will be held up to future generations as an example of bad parents. Not for anything hideous mind you, no actual physical or emotional abuse of our Little Miss or Usurper (well no more than is standard in a modern Western family anyway). It is more our willingness to risk the wellbeing of the children of our acquaintances for our own selfish ends.

You see there is a farewell picnic today for one of Little Misses friends who is moving half way across the state. This marks the first departure from her group of friends so it will be interesting to see how she copes when she realises that her little boyfriend (as Wife likes to call him just to torment me) is gone and won’t be back again. But what makes us bad parents is not my total disregard for the feelings of Little Miss when it comes to the farewelling of a friend, but the fact we are going at all.

I have been a bit sick for a couple of weeks with a throat and ear infection, Little Miss has a perforated eardrum and is still on antibiotics and Usurper currently has two little rivers of snot running down her nose - and despite all this we are still going to the picnic.

Some of you are probably thinking that it is sweet that we are dragging our sorry asses to this picnic to farewell our little friend, bit trust me it’s not. We aren’t going for that reason, we are going simply to get out of the house and not have to put up with the whinging and whining that comes with disease (mainly from me to be honest).

So we are off to infect the world with our various diseases so that we can share the burden of looking after the kids for an hour or two and hopefully have them be distracted by their little friends. I know the other parents will talk about us and complain when their own kids get sick - but hey, that’s their problem not mine, I will be relishing the hours peace before the afternoon meltdown

And another example of a bad parenting 101 would be my cries yesterday to a tantruming toddler to ‘Stop being a sook and grow up!’ - hmmmm, me thinks I expect too much of the 3 year old at times.