10 Things You Never Expected To Worry About Before You Had Kids
Parents worry. It’s what we do. The worrying starts during pregnancy, and continues indefinitely, but the things Pregnant You predicts will keep you awake at night may not quite match up with the reality that you’ll be dealing with once you have a real live post-birth individual or two on your hands.
1. Expectation: I’ll worry about whether I’ll be able to hear the baby crying in his crib while I’m working in the kitchen.
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Reality: I worry that there’s nowhere in the house where I can go to not hear screaming for five minutes on a bad teething day.
2. Expectation: I’ll worry about whether I’m doing a good enough job brushing the kids’ teeth.
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Reality: I worry about losing a finger while trying to perform rudimentary dental hygiene procedures.
3. Expectation: I’ll worry about whether they’re drinking enough milk.
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Reality: I worry about whether one of them will bludgeon the other one senseless with an empty sippy cup to steal one with a few drops of moo juice left in it.
4. Expectation: I’ll worry whether they’re eating a nutritious diet with the appropriate RDVs of each vitamin and mineral.
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Reality: I worry whether they ate more than one or two fistfuls of dog hair today.
5. Expectation: I’ll worry that they’re not getting enough mental stimulation during the day.
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Reality: I worry whether it’s possible for a baby to get too much mental stimulation, especially when provided by a complete toy percussion section. Or maybe what I’m really worrying is whether it’s possible for parents to get too much mental stimulation?
6. Expectation: I’ll worry about if they’ll like enough vegetables and fruits.
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Reality: I worry that I’ll never get to eat another banana in peace until the kids graduate high school.
7. Expectation: I’ll worry about whether they’re developing skills at the expected pace.
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Reality: I worry about whether my son is going start walking before I can get him to understand what ‘No’ (or ‘NO NO NO OH MY GOD NO’) means.
8. Expectation: I’ll worry about whether the kids are having regular bowel movements.
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Reality: I worry that when I go to wake them up in the morning they’ll have somehow slept through an overnight poo that will have exploded out of their diaper and spread metastatically throughout their PJ’s.
9. Expectation: I’ll worry about whether they’re watching too much TV.
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Reality: We watch football on Sundays, and I worry about whether both kids are going to turn out to be Lions fans like their dad.
10. Expectation: I’ll worry about whether my childproofing work is thorough enough to keep the kids out of the kitchen cupboards and off of the coffee table.
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Reality: I worry whether sacrificing a single kitchen cupboard’s worth of Tupperware containers will be enough to buy me the time to make lunch, or whether I’ll have to add to the cacophony by opening the door to the pans.
(Image: Alliance/Shutterstock)
