Feral Fridays: More Commandments

This post is written by our special guest, Wanda Vesana, guru of the revolutionary Feral Homeschooling movement that all the cool people have joined.  She is mother to two wonderful children,  son Silas and daughter Verna. You can read our interview with Wanda here. 

Being the mother of two perfectly behaved children isn't easy!  For one thing, I'm constantly besieged with questions about how exactly they manage it, whether they were born that way, or it was our own unique parenting techniques that made them turn out so ideally.  Of course, I must give credit to them.  But Tyrone and I definitely put a lot of effort into our parenting.  One of the first steps that most parenting books recommend is to make your rules clear to your offspring, in as simple a manner as possible.  It's far more likely that your expectations will be met, when they are clearly understood.  And in order to do that, it's vital that you sit down together as parents to decide what they are, and divide them into rules which are kind of general guidelines, which may get broken from time to time, and rules which are set in stone. Speaking of which, those of us from a Judeo-Christian background know that God did this already with the Ten Commandments.  He was able to define just ten rules we must always follow, which seem to cover pretty much everything vital.  Of course, He was dealing mainly with grownups.  Kids, on the other hand, have a way of coming up with startlingly creative misbehaviors which the more conventional mind of the adult would never dream of, let alone think to forbid.  And then parents are caught off-guard.  Is it fair to your offspring that you haven't previously defined this behavior as forbidden, nor consulted with our spouse to get their feedback on it?  Of course not! Therefore I've decided to share the list that Tyrone and I came up with, in order to serve as a starting point for your own efforts.  We created this list after much hard work, and I hope it's useful to you!

• No climbing under the tables of other restaurant patrons and loudly making personal comments about their knees.
• No making sculptures out of boogers.
• Pretzel sticks may not be sharpened in the pencil sharpener.
• No dyeing your body green.
• No using other people's toothbrushes.  For anything.
• No detonations in the house.
• Underwear cannot be used in public as a hat.
• No paying for things with Daddy's coin collection.
• No peeing in your squirt guns.
• Rancid yoghurt tubs may not be flung at other cars on the highway.
• No filling the car with popcorn.
• No eating your clothes.  
• Ceiling fans are not  to be used as launching devices for kids in superhero costumes, or as moving targets for paintballs.
• No gluing sleeping dogs to the carpet.
• No experiments to see how many helium balloons it takes to lift your baby sister into the air.
• All living things must be removed from pockets prior to placing clothes in laundry hampers.
• No shaving the cat.

Of course, Tyrone and I are not trying to deprive our children of all their childhood joy, so these rules are obviously only general guidelines and not set in stone!  We are pretty strict, though, and make sure they do none of these things more than once a week.

Please share your own rules in the comments!  And stay feral, everyone!

Wanda loves questions from her fans.  Email Wanda at feralwanda1 at gmail dot com.