Louisa Simmonds

1.It will rain.

2.Because it will rain, the lingering smell of boy germs will be impossible to eradicate because teenage boys don’t process the word ‘deodorant’. Occasionally, this odour is diluted by what you swear is the smell of illicit smoking from out of their bedroom window.

3.First trip to the ER – when son’s nose piercing gets caught on the shower door.

4.The local pool is littered with loitering, feral boys with too much testosterone fucking up their decision-making skills and their physical coordination.They have no intention of swimming and obviously cannot read and their idea of fun is to torment the ‘serious’, local swimmers by purposefully misjudging the lane speed and diving between the lanes very slowly.

5.Movie theatres are full of the monsters spraying popcorn and exercising their newly broken voices to maximum effect.

6.But at least there is an in-house IT specialist at home, for when the ‘computer says no’. Sadly, his sense of entitlement is so great it makes him tut every time you ask for assistance with anything ‘Apple’, and he expects to be rewarded when he does. When you remind him about the unpaid hours of parental sacrifice you have given him, you are met with that cynical eye roll, the one that is code for ‘speak my language or don’t speak to me at all’.

7.The presence of coinage in your purse is as unusual as wet towels being hung back on hooks in the bathroom

8.The living room turns into a free hostel, full of foreign boy germs by night, picked up from clubs in the city; the fridge is always empty by midday.

9.Your second trip to the ER occurs after your son’s friend, (who you suspect has been illegally drinking and probably at your house, so obviously you can’t tell the nurse), falls off the trampoline with suspected broken entitlement issues leg.

10.But…there will be blissfully little traffic on the roads, although public transport now has the fear factor of the transport system in downtown LA. You begin to understand the US leniency in their gun laws.

11.More wine will be consumed per capita of mums, to help wash down the Valium.

12.If you live in an area with a proliferation of private schools and only one barber, you will need at least three hours of new music on your phone to endure the wait.

13.The usually civil atmosphere in McDonalds has all the appeal of eating in a cockroach nest.

14.The third trip to the ER is when your teenager learns the life lesson that attaching a skateboard to the back of a friend’s bike and riding through the city tunnels is not a good idea.

15.McDonalds reassess their decision to introduce self-order machines after a group of bored teenagers hack the machines to pour ice-cream instead of bbq sauce.

16.It is the busiest time for undercover store detectives.

17.The household food bill triples and yet miraculously you are losing weight.

18.The monthly iTunes bill triples in a week.

19.You now have Stan and Presto membership, as well as Netflix, and no idea how.

20.You go directly to your teenager each time you forget the pin to any of your bankcards.

21.The local hospital forces you to increase your private health insurance

22. You cry uncontrollably when you cross out each day on the calendar and realize there’s still another week to go. You book yourself an appointment with your GP about anxiety issues and how to find the closest AA group.

23. Your son refuses to help you download music on your phone for the trip to the barber in spite of the fact you pay his phone bill and the iTunes account.

24.The dog enjoys the increase in left-over junk food fermenting under son’s bed.

25.You enter the Guinness Book of Records for number of boxes of cereal consumed per day

26.The dog begs you not to let your teenager and his friends walk her.

27.Alcohol strangely disappears from the house, and what is left, tastes suspiciously weak.

28.The dog has slept in her own bed rather than on the sofa since the holidays started, and looks depressed.

#schoolholidays #Humor #teenagers #teenageboys #Parenting