Kids Keep You Young

A lot of people say that. That doesn’t make it true.

I was just listening to some child rearing anecdotes on youtube. Most of the parents these days seem to be a lot less afraid to tell the brutal truth about raising kids than their parents were.

• We’re not afraid to say that it’s exhausting for the body and the mind.
• We’re not afraid to say that waking up to feed a baby every two hours turns our brains into mush and makes us short tempered.
• We’re not afraid to say that we’d kill for 5 or 10 minutes in the shower alone, when our children are toddlers.

I’m really not sure why our own parents were reluctant to tell us these things, or that the one thing we’d be motivated to do during our babies’ first six months of life would be to pour money into the comfiest bathrobe on the market and then wear that bathrobe until our kid was potty trained and using the microwave on their own.

Now keep in mind that I had only ONE kid. Even so, I know all this is true from first hand experience.

I woke up one morning, after having had just two or three hours of sleep. I was still trying to breastfeed but my body refused to produce milk. I came downstairs for a cup of coffee and suddenly the big, round sticker inside the cabinet door, declaring it to be a “certified cabinet” was hysterically funny.

I was pretty sure that even as tired as I was, no one would have expected me to mistake…