what to expect

I was cleaning off my bookshelf, ok truthfully the boys cleaned off my bookshelf because stacked up books made a great support for their beam bridge, and when I was cleaning the pile back up I found an old book I'd forgot I had. It's a book about what you might expect for the first years of your children's life. A potential timeline of milestones. Sometimes I think I should write a book, something to the effect of, "No Really THIS is What to Expect"

Expect to be tired and expect to become dependent on caffeine.

Expect to have food and some other things smeared on your clothes at all times.

Expect to, at least once, have your child barf or pee all over your bed in the middle of the night and be ok with just throwing a towel over it until you can deal with it in the morning.

Expect to catch some kind of bodily fluid in your hand at some point

Expect to pour a lot of cups of coffee and expect to find them half drunk all over the house in places you left them and walked away from them.

Expect then to learn to hang onto your coffee cup better.

Expect to dance around with a colicky baby trying to make their belly stop hurting

Expect to dance around like a moron when they grow up to try and entertain them in the kitchen while you're trying to make dinner and all the wheels are coming off every ones attitude but you just need a few more minutes.

Expect to some day be awoken by either a book being slammed into your face, or a car being driven up the side of your head

Expect to have the crap scared out of you when you open your eyes and your child is all of a sudden standing beside your bed in the middle of the night with their face just inches from yours and you hear a quiet little "mom"

Expect your heart to triple in size and then melt when your little tiny person learns to say "I yubbo too"

Expect to pick up things a lot, either pick them up or step on them

Expect to feel like a pack mule on occasion

Expect stepping on little tiny toys to hurt a lot

Expect to turn on your treadmill sometime to blow all the Thomas the Train tracks and engines off the back of it so you can get on

Expect to do the same thing with animals tea parties that have been set up because the treadmill is just the perfect shape and size.

Expect people to tell you to make sure you enjoy it

Expect to wonder why people choose the most unenjoyable days to tell you that

Expect to wonder how it is that time is passing so quickly

Expect to forget what you were trying to do or say

Expect to have really irritating songs stuck in your head for days on end.

Expect to look for things a lot

Expect to find them in the laundry, the toilet, or the garbage

Expect to be interrupted a lot

Expect to wonder if your children are deaf or you've become mute

Expect to have nothing on the lower shelves or the lower cabinets...nothing you like anyway.

Expect to think the world is going to crap

Expect to doll out a lot of band aids

Expect to clean melted crayon, melted chocolate, and melted other unidentified things off your car
floor or seats

Expect to be ridiculously proud of your kids as they conquer the milestones in the other books

Expect to be fascinated by how their brains work.

Expect to google things a lot

Expect to realize that you should have paid far closer attention to your vocabulary a while ago as you hear it coming out of your children's mouths.

Expect to laugh a lot if  you choose to see the laughable-ness of it all, it really is hysterical.

Expect to try not to laugh sometimes as you know laughing at what they just said or did is not what they were going for.

and Expect to enjoy it, or at least most of it, but you have to choose to sometimes.

There's more...but I really don't have time to write a book... :)