Parents, nowsadays

Dear Home Invaders,

When you declare your interest in visiting my best friend in order to inspect her new baby, you will NOT:

• Fail to confirm the exact time of the visit in advance. Calling her on a Saturday morning when you're 5 minutes from her home is not enough.
• Allow your seven-year-old and four-year-old to clamber all over her new sofa and furniture. Contrary to whatever you seen to have been telling them, other people's homes are not a public playground.
• Allow the aforementioned monsters children to (mis)handle tetrapak drinks, resulting in the spillage of sweet, sticky liquids on the new furniture. And if you do, the least you can do is make yourself useful in helping to clean up the mess, not leave it to the friends whose home you've just despoiled.
• Present clothes and other baby items that are clearly faded/used/worn and pretend that you "just bought" them as a gift. Stuffed toys that have had the stuffing whacked out of them, not to mention their unmistakable resemblance to fertile germ incubators, should be burned --- not given to the parents of a newborn.
  
• Allow your uncontrollable children anywhere near the new baby. Having your four-year-old leap at the baby's head cannot be accepted as a sign of affection,
  
• Comment pointedly that the apartment is not very child-safe. For one thing, the newborn is too young and immobile to do any apartment-exploring. For another, it's your own selfish brats who are clearly not safe to be let out anywhere that isn't their own wasteland of a room.
  

If you ever enter my best friend's home again, don't be surprised if her husband greets you at the door in full body armour with a taser or a cane, or if I spring unannounced from the back room to provide moral support and the evil eye for smacking down your kids.

Love,
Tym

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