10 Moments That No Parenting Book Prepares You For

Inside: Know that you’re not alone in living through these funny parenting stories. Also? Write them down now for when your teenager brings home their first date.

You can find a parenting book on just about everything:

• The secrets to surviving the baby stage^†,
• Strategies for stopping sibling rivalry, and
• How to raise the perfect child through guilt and manipulation.

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Shoot, I even wrote a parenting book myself about how to find happiness in the chaos of parenting life. Even so, no matter how well the parents who’ve gone before you try to pass along what they’ve learned, you end up encountering a few moments you’re never 100% prepared to handle. Related: 7 Things to Do When You’re Stuck Under a Sleeping Baby

10 Funny Parenting Stories the Books Forgot to Tell You

Know that you’re not alone in living through these parenting moments. And also? Write them down now so when your teenager brings home their first boyfriend or girlfriend, you can bust out all your funny parenting stories.

1. When you wake up in the middle of the night to the dulcet tones of someone retching next to your bed, and you sit bolt upright – but you didn’t move fast enough.
2. The afternoon when you end up frantically teaching your toddler what yoga is because she woke up earlier than expected from her nap and caught you and Daddy doing “yoga.”
3. When the baby wakes up screaming at 2:00 am, but you can’t even muster up the energy to roll over and ask your partner to get the baby this time, so instead you just pretend to be asleep until he gets the point. In fact, you pretend so well you’re convinced you deserve an Oscar, so the next morning you start bragging about it to your partner before you realize what you’re saying and shut your damn mouth.
4. That for the rest of your life when you catch a whiff of cottage cheese, you will be uncomfortably reminded of the distinctive smell of a breastfed newborn baby’s poo. Tangy? Sour? Sweet? All three maybe.
5. When you’re midway through a presentation at work before you realize you’ve been referring to yourself in the third person.
6. Discovering that your hardback copy of Anne of Green Gables that you lovingly, carefully moved from your childhood home to your college dorm to your first apartment to your first home without picking up so much as a nick or a scrape has been cannibalized by a pair of safety scissors and double-sided tape to make you a Mother’s Day card. And you’re supposed to smile.
7. Finding at least three new bruises on your body every day, and you have no idea how you got them.
8. When you have to sift through the contents of your toddler’s diaper to find the dime she swallowed.
9. Adding separate line items to your household budget for diapers, stain remover, and those squeezey pouch things because they’re just so darn convenient.
10. Actually truly wanting to go to bed at 7:30 pm every night and feeling exactly zero shame about it.

Your Turn

What funny parenting stories would you add to the list? Share in a comment below!