And today's award for the shittest parenting goes to.....

[RideSallyRide76]

Me!
Because after the crappiest crap weasel day where everything went wrong, by the time I collected ds I was too hot, too broke, too tired and too stressed to provide a decent meal or read with him. He's currently watching YouTube in bed eating an odd assortment of food that didn't require cooking.
Ham, cheese, raisin and strawberry surprise anybody?? Yum!!
Please cheer me up by telling me that you're in the running too?

My kids would have loved that!!

My mantra is ‘every body fed, nobody dead. As tonight was the first time I did bedtime alone for 2 kids I’ve said it to myself a lot.

Do the best you can with what you’ve got

We called it emergancy tea, he may well ask for it again

DD3 lost her braces at school. She told her teacher "mummy wont be cross but she will be disappointed. Id prefer her to be cross"
school now think i am some kind of psycho inflicting mental injury on my kid!

Everyone fed, no one dead! Every night one of repeats this at bed time.

The heat is a ballbag, plus that tea sounds fair game to me! DD often asked for 'if it tea' - which is if you can find it you can have it

I'm loving the idea of dinner in the bath to save time and cleaning up! We got back late and I'd forgotten to take anything out of the freezer this morning so mine had scrambled eggs on toast today. I added a few slices of avocado to make me feel better but the youngest just threw them on the floor. I can't say whether I picked them up and gave them to her sister or not

Sorry, @RideSallyRide76 - your effort pales into insignificance by my best parenting fail.

Ds1 was in the clutches of the terrible twos - he’d had a tantrum lasting an hour and a half the night before, and by 8.30am, he had been screaming for 45 minutes, and I was on the phone to dh in floods of tears because I couldn’t cope with any more tantrumming - when it went quiet. Very quiet. Suspiciously quiet.

So I rang off, and went to see what had happened, and found ds1 by the kitchen bin - it was nearly full, and the last thing that had gone in was some tortilla chips dh and I had left, the previous night.

Ds1 was happily tucking into the tortilla chips from the bin. But that is not my parenting fail - ohhhh no. That was when I looked at him and decided that, as removing him from his delicious snack would inevitably cause another trantrum, which I could not face, I would just let him go on eating!

In the end he’d had enough and wandered off - and I emptied the bin and found somewhere better to keep it. And ds1 was totally unscathed by his bin-tortillas - not even the slightest hint of tummy upset - and he is now a healthy 25-year-old graduate who never eats out of the bin!

We have a “picking plate” which is leftover bits to pick at. I call it “smorgasbord” when MIL rings to ask us what we’re eating 🙄😬

That's nothing!
I've taken my kids in uniform to mufti day twice in a row this year.

My kids would love emergency tea!

@SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius
I love it!!

That tea sounds genius. It's too fucking hot to be cooking anyway. I think everyone is reaching 'fuck it' point where we are all just limping pathetically from day to day in order to reach the school holidays. Or the weekend.

No parenting fails for me today but mainly because I've barely seen my DD2. She came home and then went out with DP on the motorbike and by the time they got back I'd gone out to help run a movie night at school. 82 kids in a boiling hot hall and they were all acting like they'd never seen a film or had pop corn before. The clean up was horrendous and at one point I had to use my 'Shouting Mum' voice to stop the kids killing each other with pillows. It was all getting slightly out of hand and I was pleased when they all buggered off home to leave us poor PTA parents to clean up the bombsite they'd created.

I do remember once, many years ago, when DD1 was little and still at nursery and I'd picked her up after I finished work and by the time we got home it was gone 6. She was stood in the hall with her little jacket and back pack on and I was hanging keys up. Suddenly I heard a thump and turned to find that she'd fallen asleep on her feet, fallen onto her back and was just lying there asleep on the floor. I felt dreadful!

DS2 is fast asleep in his clothes.

And DS1 (8) still isn't asleep

I love all the words and phrases for this kind of dinner! Can we collect them? So far I’ve spotted...

‘If it tea’
‘Emergency tea’
‘Smorgasbord’
‘Choosing plate’

I’m going to add one I love, which is ‘fuddle’

Any more?

I wish to be sent to bed with a choosing plate and YouTube - it sounds blissful...

We call that a treat tea, perfectly acceptable. He had fruit too, feel zero guilt.

I haven’t turned the oven on for over a week - if it’s no cold it’s not for dinner unless dad bbq’s it. Far too hot. Dd loves it.

@Verbena87 we call it freezer roulette

I love freezer roulette!

Here, it’s either rubbish tea (courtesy of one grandma) or bitser tea (courtesy of the other one).

Freezer roulette is great!

My ds slept until lunchtime yesterday, was only woken up by his driving instructor banging on the door (), grabbed a handful of grapes and ran off, came back to have a late lunch about half an hour before I dished up supper, may have had his supper in the small hours of the morning, but thankfully he is 18 and has finished his classes for the summer so it's really not my concern, oh glory be

@corythatwas
I'm waiting for the day when he starts sleeping in..... 5.20 am starts here, yawn!!
I bet when you get there you look back wistfully on their early childhood?

kind of, but it's quite nice having grown-up children

what one would like, of course, would be a time machine so one could go back for the occasional afternoon of snuggly cuddles and nursery rhymes

but not to the point where you could never call out and ask for a brew because he's closer to the kitchen

We just spent a week ordering takeaways. Our kitchen is basically in the living room and I couldn't stand putting the oven on in this heat. Thank god we have an Italian that has Spag Bol and other pastas!