IF you are pregnant for the first time, or are happily cradling your new baby, then maybe you shouldn't read this. I expect you think that the ante-natal classes told you all you need to know about taking care of your precious bundle.

Ha!

Ante-natal classes tell you how to look after a baby. But what good's that? You have a baby for only about a year, then you have a toddler, a child, or, gulp, a teenager - and no one tells you how to cope with them.

Probably because the truth is so awful to contemplate. What's worse, you're on your own.

But just so that you can start preparing yourself, here are just some of the things they never tell you about in ante-natal class...

* How to assemble desks/doll's houses/train sets/computers at midnight on Christmas Eve

* Parents' Nights

* How to make a sensible decision about calling the doctor when it's four in the morning, your child is screaming and you can't find the Calpol

* Nits

* How to make a costume for a fairy/shepherd/donkey/crocodile/ Chinese emperor by nine tomorrow morning because you've only just found the note screwed up in the swimming bag

* New Maths

* The day your child is not picked for the team and there is nothing you can do to make it better

* Smelly trainers (even worse than nappies)

* Hangovers - not yours, theirs. Expect the first one at around 12-years-old

* Girl/boyfriends with weird hair/tattoos/multiple piercing and distinctly peculiar eyeballs.

* Coursework

* The season ticket to casualty

* That the more vital the appointment a working mother has, the more likely it is that a child will be sick

* Lying awake waiting for them to come home

* Panicking when they haven't

* Waiting outside the school gates as they go in to get their exam results...

...which is what I am just about to do, as Smaller Son and rest of his year, educational guinea pigs since they started in the infants, collect the results of the dreaded A/S levels, surely the most mismanaged exam in history. If there is anything worse than waiting for your own exam results, it's waiting for your children's. Much much worse. And now we have three years of it. Last year it was GCSE, next year it will be A Levels.

And in 16, 17, 18 years time it will be your turn.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Published: Friday, August 11, 2001