Ten things I want to teach my daughter

For many years now I’ve been compiling a sort of mental list of the things I want to teach my children, things I feel are important, and I imagine that many, maybe most of you do something similar.  We all have our reasons for engaging in this possibly futile exercise, and today I decided to share mine, just in case you needed another example of my neuroses.

As you may already know, I’m a tiny bit into apocalyptic scenarios (one of my favorite movies is The Day After Tomorrow – no, not joking) and one of my biggest fears is dying, disappearing, getting stranded on a desert island… and not being there to see my kids grow up. So I started keeping journals for them; proper, hand-written journals. But, who am I kidding, they may not manage to glean the really salient information from all of my long-winded ramblings, or possibly by the time they’re grown the hand-written word will be so unfamiliar they won’t be able to make out what I wrote, so I decided to start a list of important things they need to know. This one is for The Girl:

1. Cherish your brother – so you’ll always have family, even after we’re gone.
2. Be nice, respectful and caring – it costs nothing and is worth millions.
3. If your bum is cold, your skirt is too short.
4. You never, ever need to do anything that makes you uncomfortable to prove your love.
5. When you’re old enough you may drink, you may even get tipsy but don’t ever get all out drunk, it’s un-lady-like and you’ll regret it.
6. If you’re unsure whether something you want to say is mean, don’t say it.
7. If your underwear is uncomfortable you’ll have a miserable day.
8. Do whatever you want with your life as long as it makes you genuinely happy.
9. Sing and dance as much as you can, it’ll make you happy on the gloomiest of days.
10. Childbirth is not as bad as everyone says, no matter how badly it hurts it’ll end soon enough and you get a baby out of it.

There you go, I’d like to do one once a month and I’ve decided to put up a linky, both to hold myself accountable and to make it more fun. So if anyone wants to participate write up your list of ten important things you want to teach your child or children and link up! I’ll be doing it the first day of every month, so it’s not too much of a hassle and we’ll see how it goes.

The previous list is just a test run and an example of what I mean, but feel free to write whatever you want whichever way you want (funny, heartfelt, ironic…) after all it’s for your children. I’ll be putting up the linky on Sunday, May 1^st (need to figure out how to do it!). If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments or email me moomser at gmail dot com. Hope to see you Sunday!