I was told the first one within weeks of my wife becoming pregnant: “Just you wait, you can say goodbye to sex for the next 9 months” Um, OK, I thought. That sounds unlikely but I’ve never done this before so what do I know? Maybe I will have the sex life of a fifteen year old again. But then over the following months they just kept rolling in:

• “Just you wait until you bring her home, you won’t sleep for two years”
• “Just you wait until she really starts crying, you’ll need ear muffs”
• “Just you wait until she is on the move, you’ll be chasing her everywhere”
• “Just you wait until she is eating real food, you can kiss eating a warm meal goodbye”

The thing is, every single one of these was total bullshit.

My wife was insatiable. Our daughter was sleeping through the night after 6 weeks. She cried only for food and diapers and quietly enough she wouldn’t have woken the proverbial tiger. Watching her become mobile was just plain fun; she stuck next to us wherever we went and at home we could easily leave her playing by herself for an hour at a time. And meals, she was eating little portions of our meals in no time all by herself and having a fantastically messy joy of a time while we ate our (still warm) adult dinners and laughed.

So to all of you advice giving, ‘I know more than you’ parents out there who want to tell a parent-to-be what to expect – Shut the Fuck Up already. Your negative, misery loves company advice is not advice. It’s just you venting that your little curtain climber was a particular pain in your whiny ass. In what fantastical world do you believe that every one of the billions upon billions of children will follow the same exact pattern of behavior?

They absolutely will not, and I know this from experience. After believing we were parents with magical powers and perfect parental instincts we had the shit kicked out of us when our second daughter was born. My wife ended up on bed rest for weeks at a time, that girl did not stop screaming for close to two years and the only way we stayed sane was to strap her to my chest every moment she was home.

So for all of you prospective parents looking for some tips, here is a tip: ignore anyone whose sentence starts with ‘just you wait’. Your kid will be unique. It might be the easiest baby alive or it might make you question your sanity. Just don’t start off with the negative attitude those jackwagons want to place on you.