Parenting is a beautiful and adventurous state of being, where parents are enamored and shocked in equal measure. They are also constantly left wondering how they got themselves into this situation in the first place.

Every mother knows that as soon as that tiny human is evicted from their womb, they are going to be filling diapers with all manner of bizarre contents. They also know that they will be expected to clean it up.

Let's face it, the gross little buggers have been busy inside of you these past few months peeing into their amniotic fluid and then re-drinking it. The fact that they are expelling their waste and not trying to recycle it is actually a positive evolution.

There are, however, a wide-ranging list of things that parents have to do as the year's pass, which gives disgusting an entirely new definition. Until you have seen a child whose face is covered in their own #2, you cannot truly comprehend the superhuman capabilities that your child actually possesses. You also can't understand what you might have to do to clean them up and help them pretend to be a regular member of society who does not eat their own waste.

So that you can be prepared, here are just some of the most disgusting things you might find yourself doing as part of your parenting duties. This knowledge won’t help you avoid them, but at least you will be forewarned.

15 Licking Suspect Things Off Your Hands

You would never dream of sitting in a meeting at work, with friends at a table in a restaurant, or at home, even alone, and licking something from your hand. This is, however, the state to which you will be reduced when you have small children.

Spend the day with somebody under the age of five, and at some point, you can almost guarantee you will look down at your hands, see something that shouldn’t be there and simultaneously think “what’s that?” and “how did it get there?”

If you are new to this childcare thing, you might have a small sliver of humanity left and rummage around in your pocket or purse for a tissue, or even go really crazy and go to the washroom to clean it off.

By the time you have spent a fair chunk of your time being a parent, you are more likely to just give the mystery substance a quick sniff and lick it quickly off of your mitt. Do not, however, forget the middle step of the sniff test in this sequence. You will probably only make this mistake once because visually a small spot of chocolate and a little spot of #2 on your hand are quite similar, taste wise they are not.

14 Nibble Off Their Nails

Of all of the items on this list “nibble off their nails” is probably the most subjective. When I was talking to a child-free friend, she mentioned how scary it must be to try and trim the nails of a baby. Those tiny little fingers with even smaller nails are very delicate, and even with the best miniature nail clippers specially designed for babies, it can feel like you are trying to cut their nails with a combine harvester.

To me, and many other mothers like me, the solution was simple. Pick up your babies hands while they are sleeping and give their nails a gentle little nibble. Have a tissue handy, into which you can dispose of the nails, and voila, stress-free (ish) trimmed baby nails. No biggie.

My friends face looked like I had just suggested I would willingly eat the contents of a dirty diaper, wipe my mouth and ask for seconds.

When I spoke to other moms, it seemed that they were roughly divided into two camps. The first group were like me and considered it perfectly acceptable and the second group were like my friend and thought that anyone who suggested such a thing, let alone carried it out, should be reported to child protective services and locked away for the benefit of all humanity.

13 Having To Catch It

This sounds like something you would never in a million years attempt to do. Indeed, in a calm, logical world, where you can sit and read about these things, trying to catch puke in your hands is a stupid and pointless action that you would never be silly enough to do.

Now fast forward to the day your child is sitting on your lap, maybe quietly looking at a book with you. They have not been ill, and there is no sign that they might become so any time soon. You are not prepared for the impending eruption from their body, so there is nothing within arms reach to help.

Suddenly your child turns to you, and that strange stomach heaving thing starts to happen. You pick them up in a panic but too late, their mouth opens, and you instinctively reach out to catch what they’re throwing before it hits you, the floor, and everything else.

Yes this is a fruitless thing to do and after it has happened you realize you actually made things far worse because now, instead of a pile of puke in one place on the floor, you are faced with hands full of puke you don’t know what to do with and a splatter effect that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern art gallery.

12 Pull A Hair Or String Out From...

Another fun activity from the “You couldn't make anything this ridiculous and disgusting up if you tried” vault is pulling things from your child's behind. I’ll pause for a moment to let that one sink in and allow you to get your head around the concept.

Now, we are talking about toddlers here, because kids are always thinking up new ways to gross you out as they get older, and we are not talking about things that have traveled upwards into the body. I am sure that happens too, but luckily I haven’t had to deal with that one.

This particular grossness occurs when your little one has, unbeknown to you, consumed either their own, or someone else's hair, some cotton, string, or wool, or even a piece of a toy that has a string like element to it.

You are usually unaware that this has happened until you are changing a diaper and as you wipe away, you discover something is encased in it and that something carries on, back into the body. You are now faced with slowly applying pressure on this string, or similar item, in an effort to pull it all out of their butt like some magician pulling scarves out of a hat in some hideous alternative universe.

11 Clean The Snot

Children have an extraordinary ability to produce at least fifteen gallons of thick, sticky snot a day, while only drinking half a pint of water. This anomaly has never been explored by science, but the ability of a child's nose to produce so much content with so little in the way of basic materials is obviously a missed opportunity.

Children do not need to have a cold or any allergies in order to have a runny nose. They seem to think it is their duty as kids to keep you on your toes and help you to be forever prepared by randomly sneezing, for no apparent reason, and producing thick glistening elevens that run from their noses to their chins.

Before they learn to blow their noses, and yes, this is a skill that has to be learned, you will have to do your best with tissues or, if you are brave, a snot sucker. Trying to lift snot with a tissue from the face of your baby is an experience you think you will gladly forgo, but remember, snot suckers need cleaning out, so you get a double fix of mucus which is not for the faint of heart.

Meanwhile, once they are old enough to blow their nose, your child will deliberately mistime the blow, so your hand and the tissue are not yet in place, or moving away, thus giving you a hand full of snot. This doesn’t really matter because no matter how thick the tissue there will always be a patch that gives up and disgorges a river of slime onto one spot of your hand anyway.

10 Fish Things From The Bathtub

This is another pleasure waiting for you when your child is that bit older. Just when you think you are out of the woods as far as new ways in which your child can hideously freak you out, you will encounter the bath bomb.

Unfortunately, this is not the type of bath bomb that smells nice and is given to you in a pretty toiletries basket by someone who is not sure what to buy you for your birthday. At least I hope not. If it is, you might want to reevaluate some of your friendships, but that's another matter entirely.

These bath bombs are delivered fresh from the overacting bottom of your child. As they are underwater, they are usually odorless gifts that sneak up on you visually instead of alerting your nose first.

If you are lucky, your child will be making a poop face and give you enough time to hook them out before they pollute the water. If you are even luckier, the bathtub will be toy and bubble free, and although you might not catch it before it gets in the water, you’ll see the loathsome log before it does too much damage.

If you are very unfortunate, the bath will be full of toys and bubbles, and your first indication that something is amiss will be when you take your hand out of the water and look questioningly at the strange brown flakes that have appeared on your hand.

Now you have to fish out the poo, let out all of the water, wash off all of the bath toys, clean the bath and do all of this while trying to work out what to do with your brown-speckled toddler.

9 Have To Wash Your Mouth

For such gorgeous love-inducing creatures, babies sure do have some amazing hidden ways to disgust you. Parenthood teaches you many things, and one of those lessons is to understand how you can love another human being more than life itself, so much so that you would do anything, even give your own life for them if you had to, and yet, at the same time still be thoroughly disgusted by that very same tiny person.

If you do not experience these two states at the same time, then you must be one of those people who can miraculously have a baby vomit straight into your open mouth and just spit out the puke, swirl some water around and laugh at the oh so funny joys of parenthood.

The rest of us meanwhile will at some point have to spit out some spit-up, gurgle with hot coffee to remove the taste of pee or wonder how we are ever going to be able to eat again now we have had our child blow chunks into our open mouths.

For some reason, this situation is always so much funnier when you are watching it happen to someone else in a YouTube video than when it happens to you. Next time you are trying to get the taste out of your mouth try to cheer yourself up by thinking how much joy and laughter you will give to other people when your other half posts the video of your horror online.

8 Retrieve Things From The Toilet

To be fair, this one doesn’t happen to all parents so you might be one of the lucky ones, but you should be prepared anyway, just in case.

For some reason, some kids become fascinated by putting things in the toilet bowl. Most of them will do it once or twice but quickly learn when you tell them “no” that this is not a pastime that mom wants them to pursue. Out of our five kids, all of them threw something in the toilet at one point, but two of them seemed to take being told "no" as a challenge to their inquisitiveness and became what we started to call in our house “flushers.”

It is not so bad when they start out with some extra toilet paper, although continually flushing then unblocking is no fun, it is when they start trying to see what else they can flush that it becomes a problem. Add to that, if you have a houseful of boys who are used to not having to flush if they just pee in the toilet, you then have a recipe for disaster.

Having to unclog the toilet full of toilet paper is one thing, but fishing the contents of your cutlery drawer out of a combo of toilet water and little boy pee is incomparable.

7 Pick Bogies

In case the idea of mopping up your kiddo's nasal fluids didn’t gross you out, you child's nose has many more gifts to leave you under the Christmas tree of horror. In a word, boogers.

Boogers are created when snot, which is predominantly water but is also made of tiny particles that are in the air such as germs, dust, and pollen dries out. This delightful nose candy can make breathing difficult for a child who is too young to blow, so it is up to you to save the day and go mining in the sticky green canyon.

Trying to pick the nose of a baby is a delicate operation. You cannot go poking about too much because you are in genuine danger of hurting them, so never, should you somehow be tempted to, put anything your finger included, up the nose.

Instead, limit yourself to gently peeling back the nasty green crust that forms over the end of the nostrils and gently pulling away from the end of the nose. If you’re lucky that will be it if you’re not the crusty plug will be followed by stands of snot which you will have to tease out gently.

Hopefully, I shouldn’t have to tell you that you should be doing this, at a minimum with your fingers at least covered in tissue and to wash your hands afterward. A full on biological, nuclear warfare suit is not a required item for this exercise but is definitely an asset.

6 Clean #2 Of Places It Doesn't Belong

The basic repugnant jobs of parenthood have not been included in this list, because everybody knows they are going to have to wipe bowel contents off of their little ones tiny, wrinkly butt. Many of the jobs that have made this list do however involve diaper dung, but only when it is in the wrong place, and that is what this entry is all about.

For reasons not understood to anybody, changing even the most disgusting diaper produced by your baby is nowhere near as bad a having to either change the diaper of a child who is not yours or having to clean your child's poop out of unexpected places.

Sometimes these places are fairly obvious, like when the wipe you are using to clean up a poopy bum splits and you get a manure manicure that you have to dig out from under your nails. You notice when it happens and clean it up straight away.

Other times, your little one will impersonate a volcano while rolling on the floor with no diaper on and you will think you have cleaned everything up until seven hours later when you put them down to sleep, and you notice a sticky reminder of their excrement eruption inexplicably caught in a spot inside their ear.

5 Suck Things Off A Soother

Much like the act of licking things off of your hand, sucking a dirty soother to make it clean becomes second nature to parents with older babies. When you first bring your newborn home you will religiously change and sterilize their soother anytime it touches anything other than their mouth and the immediate area surrounding their head. You will probably have a stash of soothers within arms reach and happily swap them out whenever they are needed.

This begins to feel less important as your child grows older. I would like to claim that it is because we know our newborns are vulnerable to infection and need to be protected and that as they grow that becomes less critical but honestly, as your baby gets bigger it becomes difficult to justify running to get a clean soother in case they get sick when you just caught them sucking the dogs paw.

For this reason, you will pick a soother off of the floor, stick it in your mouth, suck it “clean” and hand it back to your little one, usually ingesting some slimy food residue mixed with dirt and hair while you are at it.

4 Eat Questionable Food

Not every disgusting thing you have to do as a parent directly involves your child and their bodily functions. Sometimes you find yourself doing things because it is quicker and easier and compared to all of the other gross stuff you have had to do that day, one more thing doesn’t seem so bad. This is why so many parents end up eating questionable food, and this quirk found in most parents creeps up on you slowly.

Your newborn baby is cluster feeding and the hot snack you prepared in anticipation of them sleeping for a half hour after their feed has now been sitting congealing on the kitchen counter for half of the day. You end up eating it because to throw it away would be a waste, because you would have to expend too much effort in walking to the garbage to throw it away, and because you cannot face trying to make something else to eat.

This softens you up and slowly makes you immune to cold, gross food until eventually, a couple of years down the line, you realize you have been absentmindedly eating the spat our remains of your toddlers sandwich while you clean their highchair after lunch.

3 No Change Of Clothes

Another indirect “gross parenting 101” module involves your clothes. If you start out as a person who spends a lot of time on personal grooming and ensuring your clothes look their best, then this might not happen to you. On the other hand, if you are more like me, the kind of person who can just remember to drag a hairbrush through their unruly locks before rushing out the door, probably wearing mismatched clothes, then you are in danger of walking down this path.

Like the food, it starts out slowly with you changing every time you get something on your clothes then you start to realize you only have four tee-shirts and you start wiping stuff off of your clothes instead.

Before you know it, you are stuck at home, on your own with a bay and have suddenly realized that you are still wearing the same PJ’s your kiddo peed on three days ago and there is a multilayered breast milk leak on your chest that is beginning to look like an inkblot test.

Don’t feel bad when you notice the contents of the laundry basket are cleaner than the clothes you have on. It happens to most of us. Give yourself a break, get someone else to look after the sprog for a while, and go grab a shower and some fresh clothes. There will come a time again when they will stay clean all day, I promise.

2 Pick Chunks Out Of Your Hair

This title of this entry was not written to be intentionally ambiguous, but when I got this far down the list, I realized that this ambiguity was perfect.

Originally this was going to be an entry that talked about how gross it is when your child vomits on your head, and you have to clean them up and deal with their needs while walking the house with a slowly cooling, slowly congealing paste forming an avant-garde hat on your noggin. Once you hand junior off to someone else or clean them up yourself you get in the shower and try to wash your hair without getting watery, shower gel tinged vomit in your eyes or mouth and finally you have to brush your hair under the flow of water and pick out any stubborn chunks that are still clinging for dear life to your crowning glory.

When I got as far as writing this and had carried out a mental inventory of some of the many disgusting parenting moments I have experienced I came to the realization it is not just nasty pieces of vomit you have to pick out of your hair.

I have done this on a couple of occasions, but I have also had to wash snot off my head only to discover it had dried somewhat and had turned to giant, apparently waterproof boogers in my hair. I also remembered the time two of our kids had terrible stomach bugs at the same time. I bent down to clean one of them up, got poop in my hair and had just to tie it back while I carried on cleaning up the two little ones. It was over a half hour before I could get to the shower, by which point I had to pick it out of my hair.

1 Juggle Sicknesses And #2

Speaking of multiple little ones driving you to the edge of madness by being violently sick at the same time, we come to our final entry.

When I say juggle sick and poop I do not, of course, mean it literally. That would be silly. It would fall through your fingers and splash on the floor, and you would have nobody wanting to sit in the front five rows of the audience for an act like that.

Instead, I mean those times when you find yourself sitting on the bathroom floor, holding back the hair of one child who is throwing up into the toilet while rubbing the back of the child who is laying across your lap with gross watery poop leaking from the sides of their diaper. Meanwhile, you are using your foot to hold a bucket against the but of the child throwing up because they have started to involuntary poop each time they hurl and you are making a valiant effort to hold back the building wave of vomit your own body is trying to expel.

Who said parenthood couldn’t be glamorous?