When you’re getting ready to be a parent, there is certainly no shortage of advice. Yet, there are so many things that nobody ever tells you about parenting young kids.
When I was expecting my first, I thought that I could do a whole bunch of research beforehand and make sure I was prepared. I read about baby development, sleep, breastfeeding…you get the picture. I thought that, as a scientist, I should be able to find out everything I needed to know to make this parenting thing a breeze. WRONG! Sometimes babies just don’t make sense, and kids are definitely not logical.
Here are some of the surprising things that I’ve learned along the way, as my kids progressed from babyhood to now:
Surprise #1: Making a birth plan? You might as well be making a plan for your next trip to the moon.
When we’re about to give birth, we tend to want to try to control everything about it. Well move over! There’s a new boss in town. This will be the first of many times in your new life that events will be entirely controlled by a little being with its own whims.
I planned a c-section for my first, and ended up laboring for 12h before I made it to the operating table. A friend was set on a natural birth – labored for 48h(!!) and ended up with a c-section when the baby wouldn’t fit. Plan for absolutely anything. Baby’s in charge now. Welcome to the jungle!
Surprise #2: Breastfeeding is really hard!!
You’d think that a process designed by nature to keep your baby alive would be easy and intuitive, right? Nope! For some reason, babies don’t automatically know how to get the milk out of you like every other mammal in the world does. They’re learning right there along with you. You find yourself leaning half upside-down trying to find the perfect position to get the right latch, and the first time you get that right latch, Hooooooolllly crap! A piranha is devouring your boob! Do they really have no teeth??
Truth be told, you learn the position, you get used to the sensation, and it’s really an amazingly beautiful special thing that you share with your baby. But it is H-A-R-D. Mommas who get it and then last more than a few months really should get a medal.
Surprise #3: Parenting young kids means spending a ridiculous amount of time talking about poop.
When babies are young, they poop every color of the rainbow. You’ll spend time looking up each and every color, worrying over whether the color you’re seeing is the exact same shade of green. Or is it a little darker?
Generally, most guides will look something like this:
Of course, if you want some real information on poop colors, go here!
The poop conversation doesn’t end there! When they’re potty training, you’ll probably dance around the house in celebration of the first potty poop.
And as the kids get older, you will be asked every question possible about why we poop, why poop comes in different shapes, why poop smells, and why it is not ok to play with your poop (yuck!).
Surprise #4: “Spit up” is often a lot more than a simple dribble of spit.
Sometimes it’s a projectile launch of gut contents. The power of a tiny baby’s stomach is actually quite shocking!
My youngest had reflux. That meant that everyone around her wore head-to- toe “spit up” for the first month or so of her life. One time, it hit the wall 5 feet away! Lovely!
The interesting part is that it didn’t seem to phase my little one. She’d eat, puke, and then smile at me like the world was a bright sunshiny place. If only we adults felt so happy and content after hanging our heads over the porcelain throne.
Surprise #5: The color of a cup can make or break the taste of a drink
Did you think that milk tastes the same in any color cup? Well, my oldest is here to tell you that, no, milk is best in the blue cup. My youngest insists that the pink cup imparts the best flavor on the milk. I’m waiting for them to start swirling and sniffing like they would a fine wine. You’ve gotta make sure you have the right shaped wine glass (or in the case of parenting young kids, the right color cup).
Surprise #6: Toddlers are excellent at gaslighting.
You think you know what you’re doing. You think you remember events clearly. But according to your toddler, you would be wrong. She did NOT like that same jelly sandwich yesterday. In fact, even though she ate three of them, that jelly sandwich is THE most disgusting thing in the world, and she’ll never ever eat a jelly sandwich again. Not only that, but she did not throw her broccoli at you last week. She loves broccoli! Can she have some more?
Oh, and one more thing. It isn’t a blue cup that makes the milk taste good. It’s the orange one, mommmmmmmm!
Surprise #7: You’ll gain a new appreciation for The Exorcist.
They had to come up with the image of the screaming girl with her head spinning around from somewhere, right? Parenting young kids means dealing with tantrums, and I’m not sure that anyone can truly prepare a parent for the magnitude of the emotion that can fly out of a young child. At times, it really does seem that their heads might spin around (and I already mentioned the capacity to projectile vomit above).
There’s a common misnomer for this time in a child’s life – the terrible 2’s. In fact, it is actually the terrible 1.5-4’s. Yup! Unfortunately, kids completely lose their minds over something as simple as the color of a cup on a relatively routine basis throughout this whole span, and that’s totally normal. Luckily, a second after a tantrum ends, your child will do something that you deem absolutely adorable, and your brain will be flooded with total and complete love until the next tantrum.
Surprise #8: You’ll find yourself saying things that you could never have imagined.
When you’re parenting young kids, you end up saying some very strange things! Some of my personal favorites:
- Get your head out of the dog’s water bowl!
- You have to eat your dinner before you’re allowed to clean the toilet.
- Stop running around with your underwear on your head!
- Where is your sister? Is she hiding in the fridge again?!
- Who painted the pink hearts on the wall with…is that yogurt?
- And we don’t dance without clothes unless you’re 18, there’s a pole present, and I’m dead.
Surprise #9: Kids can hear and remember absolutely everything.
And I mean everything. If you want to tell someone that Aunt Sally is a lunatic, you better not do it anywhere near a little kid, even if you whisper. They have supernatural hearing. And they may not look like they’re paying attention, but when you see Aunt Sally three months from now, sure as sugar they’re going to come out with “Aunt Sally! Momma says you’re a lunatic! What’s a lunatic?”.
They also remember any empty promises you make to placate them in the current moment. You know, those times when you say something like “get in the car and we’ll go to the park sometime soon”.
You think that they’ll never remember what you said, but then, when you least expect it, they’ll ask about it…and then ask about it again the next day…and the next day. Then you get the “You prooommmmiisseedd!”. The point is, if you say it, you’ll have to do it. They N-E-V-E-R forget.
Surprise #10: Little kids have no filters.
This means that they don’t care who is watching them when they decide to sing at the top of their lungs or “do that twerk dance thing” they learned at school.
Sometimes, I want to carry a mic with me and make announcements like:
And sometimes I want an Invisibility Cloak, like the time my then 3yo belted “I Like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie” through the entire store.
I’ll admit, this joie de vivre can be adorable. I loved the pure unadulterated joy that my oldest expressed this year when she got her call from Santa.
(BTW, if you’re looking for an awesome Santa app that sends video messages and calls, check out PNP Santa!).
Surprise #11: Conversations with kids can make you question your very existence
They ask SO many questions! And not just any questions, hard questions, like:
- Why do we have earlobes?
- What happens if all the people on Earth die and I don’t?
- How do we know that unicorns aren’t real?
- If Santa is always watching, does he watch me while I get dressed?
The part that really gets you is the “whys” that come after. For example, this exchange:
You’re right kid! We should all run around naked in a rule-less society, and probably we should be eating candy all day every day.
Surprise #12: Their imaginations are so vivid, they can be downright creepy!
Kids can create these entire worlds that are full of intricacy and complication. Sometimes, while you’re distracted by something, you can hear them in another room having these elaborate conversations with no one in particular. Dolls experience the stuff of Oscar winning movies.
When my oldest was 2, she was convinced that we had “a little man who sat up on the ceiling fan”. One day, while I was changing her diaper, she yelled “Look out Mama! The man is behind you, kissing your cheek!”. It wasn’t long before I was glancing around the room and looking over my shoulder, just to be sure.
Surprise #13: Parenthood is actually a mix of many different careers.
As a mom, I play the role of:
- A chef (mashed bananas anyone? Ooh, I see you’ve decided to go with the playdoh instead. Ok then)
- A hairdresser (what is that in your hair?? Eew. Uh…ok, we’ll just cut it out)
- A doctor (so you dreamt that your left toe turned green and now your right nostril feels weird? Sounds like a job for Tylenol)
- A plumber (you put WHAT in your nose? Ok, I’ll get the tweezers…again…)
- A detective (that’s chocolate all over your face, right?? Err…time for some sophisticated smell analyses)
- A mathematician (there’s a 50% chance the baby will wake up before the end of the car ride but a 60% chance the 3yo will fall asleep in the car before the baby wakes up. What is the chance I’ll get 10min of sanity? Trick question – it’s always 0%. And…
- A lawyer (no, you can’t run around naked because of the ironclad argument in the mommy contract entitled “I’m the boss applesauce”).
Surprise #14: You’ll feel love like you’ve never felt before
From that first moment that you bond with your baby, you are whipped! That baby could be the ugliest thing in the world, and you will think that s/he is soooooooo beautiful! The intensity of the affection you feel for that child can even at times leave you a weeping mess in those first days.
Before having kids, a kindergarten musical would be a torturous cacophony of off-key screeching. But if your kid is up there, you tear up at the brilliance of the barely discernible line that s/he mumbled into the microphone.
For me, having kids allowed me to develop an emotional depth that I could never have imagined beforehand. I will do anything for these girls, and it’s frankly the most wonderful feeling in the world.
Time for the take-home!
For parents, every day is full of surprises. There is no book out there that covers what you will encounter while parenting young kids. No person can adequately describe the absurdity, the perplexity, the laughter, and the incredible amount of love that parents experience.
I could offer you all of the scientific evidence in the world to help you to make parenting decisions, but in my opinion, the best advice that any parent can give is to eliminate your expectations, assume you will be surprised, and respond to those surprises with laughter.
Parents, what additional surprises have you encountered while parenting young kids? I’d love to read about them in the comments below!
