My friend is going to be a new mom. She’s so worried. Wants to get it all right. She told me she needs a manual. I laughed and said, “Oh, sweetie, you don’t need a manual to tell you what you’re doing wrong. That’s why you have grandparents. Don’t you worry. They will point out every single thing that you’re doing wrong, and how they would have done it differently in their day.” So they say you can’t fully prepare for motherhood (whoever “they” are they probably don’t even have children) and I think they are probably right. But you can try. So here’s my list of things you can do to prepare for motherhood. Handle it with care. 1. Take all your clothes in three sizes and stain them. Lower the bra straps by a foot, and start getting used to the term “muffin top”. 2. Eat all your meals standing up, in thirty seconds or less, including the pieces you drop on the floor. Come up with four hundred and fifty-seven variations on why vegetables are good for you, why those are not dead bugs in your oatmeal, and why every meal does not have to come with a toy. 3. Hire someone under four feet to come into your bedroom in the middle of the night when you are sound asleep and just stand there at the side of your bed staring at you. 4. Record someone saying “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy” over and over again – and then go make a second one – and play them all day long, every day, over and over and over until you start to cry for no reason. 5. Sprinkle crumbs in your bed and put a lizard down at the feet. Preferably a dead one. Get a forty-pound pillow with feet and stick it right between you and your husband, with one foot in your face and the other foot in his ribs. Now get romantic. 6. Go to the grocery store and hire someone to sit in the buggy and yell for everything you pass, throwing items out as you put them in. Pass all your favorite gourmet foods and head directly for the packaged fruit snack aisle. Buy the most expensive box because it has a super hero on it. Don’t bother opening it. They won’t actually eat it. When you get to the register to pay, have that person you hired to sit in the buggy throw a complete meltdown because the balloon corral is empty. Leave your buggy filled with groceries and spank said hired person in parking lot. Bring $200 for bail. And a pack of balloons. 7. Throw away your dancing shoes and fancy wine glasses. Watch twenty-four straight hours of anything purple that dances. Listen to the same song six thousand times. Turn down the invitation to the wild parties that last all night or until someone pukes – and go the party that lasts two hours, feels like ten, with consistent high pitched screaming, cardboard pizza and three crying fits - that ends by dinner or when someone pukes. 8. Start spelling your conversations. 9. Program all your car radio stations to play the same song. Scatter some petrified french fries in between the seats. Pee on the carpet in the back. Lick the windows and draw a long line down the side with a permanent purple marker. If your car is cute and sporty – trade it for one a family of four could sleep in. 10. Get your house exactly the way you want it – take one good long last look – and then blow it up. Every bit of it. Place sharp invisible toys along the path that you take to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Hide the partner for every shoe and every sock. Fill the tub with toys. Rig every cabinet and closet door in your house with a plastic contraption that you can’t operate if your life depended on it. 11. Go out and find a best friend that will let you do everything – make her stuff, give her money, do her homework, clean her room, give her advice, listen to her problems, watch every soccer game and ballet recital, throw parties for her, bail her out of jail – a friend who will never say thank you, never appreciate you, never return the favor, who doesn’t want to be seen with you, and will choose a root canal over spending time with you – and at least once a day have her head spin around on its axis like a demon while she tells you that she hates you and do you have five dollars she can borrow? 12. And, last but not least, let us put you in a room and sneeze on you, pee on you, barf on you, cover you in sticky, ask you to press the bleeding until it stops, pick this up off the floor and eat it, let four hundred sick people touch your face, roll you in dirty soccer uniforms, fish a dead frog out of the toilet, slide you under the bed to get whatever that is with crust, let you pull the hair out of the drain of a family of four, and show you how to inspect the dog’s rear end for that missing Lego – and you my friend will be ready for motherhood. Or at least day one. Mind you, these are only tips to help you prepare. Because it is true that you are never one hundred percent ready to be a mom. Just as you will never one hundred percent get it right. I have yet to meet a person who is perfect, and if nobody is perfect, then how can we expect them to be perfect parents? We can’t. Secretly, not a one of us knows what we’re doing half the time. Some days we get it wrong, and some days we get it right. It’s why we should forgive our parents and move on. It’s why our kids will probably need therapy too. So much of parenthood is beyond our control. It’s why we need each other to help us along. It’s why we continue to fall, and dust ourselves off, and get back up. Because hard as it may be, we wouldn’t trade those kids for the world. Even if they end up killing us. And one day, they will come to you as an adult, with tears in their eyes, and say, “Mom – we’re going to have a baby.” And you will just laugh – and get ready - to tell them everything they are doing wrong.
Article Source: http://www.bizymoms.com/expert-advice
Kelly Swanson Comedian motivational speaker www.kellyswanson.net