Having kids of course!
I have two. Ones a saint. The other? Cries ALL the time. We're a year in with him now and he has literally cried all day every day for the entire year. We've had him checked out - there's nothing wrong with him. He's just a little sensitive. One cannot truly understand what it is like to have the limits of your sanity tested by this screaming ball of snot and tears - that you unconditionally love.
We all know kids cry, right? Well let me spell it out for you, here's a typical day for me:
It's 5:00 am and he's screaming. He's woken his sister, so it's time to get up. Lie-ins are a thing of the past! Both kids have just woken so they are still tired. And crying/moaning. We go downstairs and start making breakfast; my wife and I do this together in the kitchen to speed things up as I'll have to leave for work soon. Both kids are at the gate by the kitchen screaming because they want to come in. We calmly go through the daily rigmarole of explaining they cannot come into the kitchen with us.
We finally get them sat down and eating. My daughter can feed herself but we have to feed my son. When we're done there is breakfast everywhere. The walls, the carpet, the chair - everywhere. My son gets it all in his pyjamas, neck creases, flaps and ears. We spend around ten whole minutes cleaning up.
They're done and now it's time to get dressed so they are crying/playing up again. My daughter is dressed in seconds. My son has to be caught, wrestled to the ground and restrained. He doesn't understand why we have to get him dressed, so he's screaming and scratching. We're trying to make it fun for him but really it just makes him act up more. Once he's dressed he reveals a big soggy clump of Weetabix he had hiding in his fingers and covers himself in it. We get him dressed a second time. The he takes the biggest shit ever and it goes all up his back - because nappies. So we dress him for the third time.
That leaves me around ten minutes to get ready for work. They act up as I leave and I start to feel sorry for my wife. Whilst I'm at work the kids will take part in various daily escapades. Their favourite thing to do right now is scale the TV stand which is just high enough for a one year-old to vault. They destroyed my HDMI cable by knocking the TV off of it's stand a few weeks ago. They trash the house hourly, my wife is constantly cleaning up behind them. They break everything from drawers to cupboards and injure themselves in ways you probably never thought possible. All the time whilst this is happening my son is crying (my poor wife). At some point during the day my daughter will have a tantrum which usually results in me delivering discipline over the phone because she's ignoring my wife.
After a long slog at work, I'll walk a mile home. I can hear my son screaming before I reach the front door. I pull out my keys and stare at them for a moment. A tiny voice beckons "RUN FOR THE HILLS! WE COULD SLEEP FOR DAYS!" But I ignore it because I love my little family. We do the whole morning routine again in reverse, the screaming over dinner, the drama of bathtime - and then finally when you think it's all over - when you think that you can finally have a rest, an evening... You start to think about maybe playing some video games, watching TV or other things with the wife.
And then one of them doesn't want to sleep. And you're stuck with the same old screaming and crying for hours. Sometimes It goes on so much we have to sacrifice our entire evening to have one of the kids in our bed. We finally get the problematic one to sleep and we conk out almost instantly. Around 2am the other wakes up. I spend 20 minutes in a daze trying to sort it, then it's back to bed.
And then HAY! it's 5 am again! And we're screaming again!
Kids. It ain't no walk in the park.