Parenting Reality Quotes

I wish someone had got hold of me and said, 'You know, children are really good fun. You will have a fantastic time, and you will still work.'

Parenting is meant to be just a natural part of life. You just think you know how to do it but, of course, it's much more complicated than that.

I read somewhere that Mitt and I have a 'storybook marriage.' Well, in the storybooks I read, there were never long, long, rainy winter afternoons in a house with five boys screaming at once. And those storybooks never seemed to have chapters called MS or breast cancer.

A perfect parent is a person with excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children.

When your child stops breathing 60 times a night, you don't worry about what's going on next year or even next week. You put aside thoughts about which preschool you're going to enroll him in and focus on how he's doing right now. It's not the Norman Rockwell relationship that you sign on for when becoming a parent.

When I had my first child, I was too embarrassed to tell a single soul that I wasn't the over-the-moon, picture-perfect new mother I was supposed to be.

My life is nothing like the Daddy Day Care life. Me around the house is nothing like the Daddy Day Care dad.

I thought that once we were out of the baby stage, parenting would be a breeze.

My father had nine children, and when I had my first, he said, 'None of my kids got up in the middle of the night.' And I remember thinking, 'You didn't get up in the middle of the night! Every kid gets up in the middle of the night!'

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories.

With a new baby, you have a bad day now and again because you're particularly tired, but most of the time, you're fine. You spend a lot of your time trying to figure out how you can get more sleep, but really, you're better off just giving up and admitting that you're not going to, so forget about it.

Very early in our children's lives we will be forced to realize that the "perfect" untroubled life we'd like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don't want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.

You hear so much awful stuff before you have a kid, like you'll never sleep again, we always knew it would be utter garbage. We're pretty relaxed people, the less stressed you are the more easy you'll find parenting.

There is nothing like waking up at six in the morning and changing a baby's nappy to bring you face to face with life's reality.

The mistakes that I made I made because I drank too much. I don't think that's going to happen any more. Am I going to make mistakes as a parent? Sadly, every day. I'm looking around for the perfect parent and I haven't seen one yet.

I work, and then whenever I have any other time, I'm with my daughter, and then I go to sleep. I think you basically have to abandon the dreams of having any other adult activities in your life. You have to go to sleep whenever your child goes to sleep. That's basically how we're doing it.

We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.

One of the sad realities of being a parent is that the same stuff you know is exciting, educational, and enriching in your child'slife is often messy, smelly and exhausting to deal with.

Because our generation has waited so long to have babies, we feel we've 'discovered' something that women have been doing for thousands of years. I have no illusions that I will be in the same situation as the average working mother. I'm not trying to prove anything - I just want to have kids.

When I was pregnant, I had the romantic idea that after the baby was born I would not only take up reading in earnest again, but also write a novel while my daughter slept in her Moses basket. Of course, I barely had time to keep up with my magazines until she started sleeping properly.

My site is about women who want to look good and stay active: women who don't want to suddenly become 'just mums.' But it's not true that it is only about the glamorous side. Last time I was on a plane with Romy, she was sick all over me, and I wrote a tip about travelling with a change of outfit.

Before you have a baby, friends tell you 'sleep now,' and you laugh because you don't think that all those stories could be true. But they are.

Friends always say you don't realise how robust your baby is until you drop it.

Anybody who thinks they're the perfect parent is a fool.

This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.