Mama said there'd be days like this.

Before I start this, let me just say, I know how lucky I am.  But I don't think there's a parent in the world who will disagree with me when I say that the reality of being a parent is one where you just have to take the good with the bad. So, here it goes:

(Fair warning, Dad, you may want to skip this post.)

- I haven't slept through the night in 2012, because let's face it, I wasn't exactly sleeping all night when I was 9 months pregnant, uncomfortable, and had to pee every 10 minutes.
- I DVR shows so I can watch them in the middle of the night when she decides it's time to party at 3am.
- The first beer that I drank in nearly a year was after hours of listening to my child scream in my ear (thanks, 2 month immunizations), and I was sitting in my bed, half-dressed, holding a (finally) sleeping baby. I think there's a Jeff Foxworthy redneck joke for this.
- I used to wonder how on earth there could be studies that report something like 62% of lemons in grocery stores had fecal matter on them. Now I know. I may wash my hands after changing dirty diapers, but I'd be willing to bet that somewhere, some poop particles snuck by the soap. 
- I'm not even going to discuss the process of the breast pump, but I will say that the makers of the breast pump really need to rethink their marketing strategy. On the box, rather than putting pictures of happy mommies and smiling babies, they should put a picture of a woman out with her girlfriends, or wearing a shirt that isn't covering in spit-up, or carrying a purse that doesn't have 6 diapers in it.  Because, let's face it, if you ever want to leave the house again, you need that breast pump.
- If I'm wearing a shirt that doesn't have spit-up on it, I've only been wearing it for five minutes.
- I change the sheets on our bed when they've been spit up on, pooped on, or peed on. If that hasn't happened, they're probably clean enough...right?
- Three minutes after we arrived home from the hospital, the dog puked on the floor. It's on video.
- Men and women are not equal. Women are far stronger.  Case in point: try telling a man to have major abdominal surgery while wide awake, and then learn to breastfeed (ouch) within an hour of leaving the operating room.  Then, as he attempts to recover from said surgery, wake him up at least every 2-3 hours during the night for weeks.  The human race would cease to exist.  (Boys, don't say you would do it if you had to. We all know you're only saying that because you know it'll never happen.)
- Infinite Truth: The parent of an infant will never own enough burpcloths.
- Second Infinite Truth: A nursing mother will inevitably discover several times a day that the burpcloth is halfway across the room and she cannot go get it because she is nursing.  Her glass of water, the TV remote, and her cell phone are also halfway across the room.
- When a woman is pregnant, sometimes the baby will position itself in such a way that when it kicks, it will kick its mother in the hoo-ha. I was reading an article once that defined this as "crotch lightening." There is no better way to describe it.
- When trying to calm a crying newborn, many parents will sing lullaby after lullaby, only to discover that something like "Baby Got Back" would have done the trick hours ago.
- I love it when my child sleeps 7 hours straight. I wake up smiling...until I realize that my boobs are rock solid and leaking because my body thinks she's still needs to eat every 2-3 hours. The only way to avoid this is to wake up and pump when she sleeps for long stretches, and heaven knows I'm not sacrificing 30 minutes of sleep to do that.
- Many people have told me that I look great since having Nora. I say thank you, and I really mean it, but in my mind I secretly know that I still have a dark brown line running down the center of my flabby stomach, and when I sit down, my pre-pregnancy jeans don't look so hot anymore.
- Last week, as I was carrying Nora to the bathtub, she peed on me.  I realized 3 hours later that I hadn't changed my clothes yet.

Nora, if it's many years later and you're reading this, please know that you are worth all of this craziness, and I love you.  Someday, if you choose, you'll do all of this for your own little one, too.

Dad, if you're still reading this, you can't say I didn't warn you.