Parenting Simulation Activities

So, you’re pregnant. Congrats! Now what? Here is a comprehensive list of activities you can do to practice parenting skills:

1. Get up every two hours at night. Pull your boob out of your shirt or mix a bottle of formula. Watch horrible TV for 20 minutes while feeding your imaginary baby. Put baby back to bed. 3 minutes later, get out of bed. Try to sooth imaginary baby. Repeat x 20.   
2. Rub melted chocolate into half of your baby outfits. Attempt to get the stain out. *In this simulation you are not allowed to eat the chocolate off of the outfit. That would be a fatal mistake in the real parenting world.
3. Practice feeding baby food to a rock. Or a rabid dog. Both would be similar to what you will experience.
4. Have someone scatter goldfish across your floor every day. Make sure they put them all over the house and in obscure locations. Then step on them or rub them into the carpet.
5. When you go grocery shopping, throw one item out of your cart every 30 seconds. Pick it up. Put it back in cart. Repeat.
6. Take $1,500 and throw it in the garbage. That’s to simulate paying for diapers.
7. While eating dinner, wait 5 minutes between every bite of food you take. Sometimes for fun you can take 1 bite, pause for 30 minutes, and then return to your meal. At this point you can take 5 bites. But then your imaginary baby will wake up. Throw the rest of your meal away.
8. Take a class on negotiating with terrorists.
9. Have someone ask you the same question over and over for one hour straight.
10. Before you leave the house, run up and down your stairs 10 times. Spend 10 minutes searching for a “lost” item. Put a coat on your cat. Try to herd the cat into the car. Once cat is in car, attempt to buckle into the car seat.
11. Do laundry for your entire neighborhood.
12. Bring a puppy to a restaurant. Make it sit in the high chair for the entire meal.
13. Have someone interrupt every sentence you speak for the next 5 years.
14. Sit in a rocking chair and rock for 24 hours straight. This will simulate length of time it takes to get baby to sleep and keep them asleep.
15. Stop using half of your dishwasher to simulate amount of space required for baby bottles and baby things.
16. Have hide 50 pacifiers throughout the house. Set an alarm for 3am. When it goes off, you must find one of the pacifiers in the dark. Alarms should also be set for 4am, 4:20am, 5am, and 6am. You must find a different pacifier at each of these time points.
17. Every time you take a picture (of a person, place or thing), say “smile!” (while obnoxiously smiling yourself) at least 15 times before each picture. Take at least 100 pictures to try to capture one where your desired object is smiling.
18. Shake a whole box of lucky charms into your car- make sure to get in the crevices.
19. Sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” every time you are in the car for the whole car ride.
20. Have someone respond “No” to you every time you ask them a question.  

I’d love to hear your own ideas!

Laura