Confessions of a Scary Mommy: An Honest and Irreverent Look at Motherhood: The Good, the Bad, and the Scary Read Online Free PDF Page A

. . . when we started having babies he could do no right.
    • Everyone loves the smell of new babies, but I thought mine stunk!
    • “Sleep when the baby sleeps” is the most irritating, useless thing ever said to a new mother. I’m going to slap the next woman who says it. Because I know she didn’t sleep when the baby slept. No one does.
    • If babies were sleeping through the night at ten months old, I’d probably have seven more.
    • I like my children best when they are newborns. I like them less every year after.
    • Women everywhere should shield their babies’ chubby thighs from my view . . . I refuse to keep my hands to myself.
    • My baby is the only baby in the world who doesn’t look like an ugly bald old man to me.
    T he first weekend that we got back from our honeymoon, Jeff and I ran out as fast as we could and bought a puppy. I remember driving out to the breeder’s house several hours away and observing the precious little litter all playing together happily in the backyard, cute as could possibly be. After we picked out our tiny orange fur ball, the breeder sat down with us and drilled us on every detail of our lives: What was our house like? How many floors did it have? How flexible was our schedule? Did we travel on weekends? Had we explored puppy training? Did we have other dogs? Children? A housebreaking plan? Good Lord, this is intense, we communicated through eye rolls and side glances. But we diligently answered all of her questions and more. At the end of the interrogation, we were rewarded with an adorable eight-week-old golden retriever, who we immediately named Penelope. The woman handed us the papers, along with a list of puppy resources and veterinarians. Off we went, our new little family, confident that we had everything we needed to raise a happy and healthy dog.
    Leaving the hospital with Lily was an entirely different experience. I was shocked that the nurses didn’t ask us a single time whether we knew how to feed her or change her or soothe her in the middle of the night. They didn’t want to inspect our home to see whether it was baby-ready or do a thorough background check on either one of us. They didn’t ask for college transcripts or even whether we were CPR certified—we could have been serial killers and they wouldn’t have known or cared. At the end of my two-day stay, they simply plopped me in a wheelchair and pushed me out the front door. Jeff and I looked at each other incredulously— that was it? Why was bringing home a puppy a thousand times more complicated? Where was my take-homefact sheet to refer to in the wee hours of the night when we had no idea what the hell to do? Where was my money-back guarantee? I’d never felt so unprepared for anything in my life.
    It must have been obvious to the world that I had no clue what I was doing, because suddenly, everyone and their freaking mothers was an expert on child rearing. The neighbor who dropped by with an aluminum tray of overcooked lasagna had all the answers regarding sleep scheduling and took two full hours to explain them to me. The one with the chicken pot pie informed me that pacifiers had permanently botched her now teenage daughter’s teeth. Baked ziti with a side of meatballs explained to me that the less I bathed my baby, the more beautiful her skin would be. My mother-in-law claimed that she knew the best way to soothe a crying infant. Cousins and aunts and uncles and mere acquaintances piped in with their experiences and knowledge concerning spitting up, burping, bathing, and umbilical cords. Even the UPS guy volunteered his views on circumcision. (For the record, he was vehemently opposed. I didn’t ask him to elaborate.)
    One thing that I decided, on my own and through no consensus from the peanut gallery, was that I would breast-feed my child. Not only was it best for the baby, but also it would help me take the baby weight off, and I needed all the help I could get in that department.