Advice people offer at baby showers:

1. Sleep when the baby sleeps.
2. Burp cloths are helpful for a little spit-up here and there.
3. Register for some really cute muslin swaddle blankets!

Advice people DON’T offer at baby showers:

1. Sometimes babies don’t sleep.
2. Some babies projectile vomit and it’s quite terrifying.
3. Register for a top-of-the-line hand held vacuum. (But, really. Seriously.)

A few weeks after we found I was pregnant with our first baby, we were invited to a dinner party with four other families. I remember arriving early to Sharon’s house to help tidy up and finish cooking.  Like me, she was newly pregnant. We rubbed our blossoming bellies while she slowly stirred the spaghetti noodles. It was quiet and calm and clean in the kitchen, not unlike the rest of our life.

Looking back, this is the night I learned that dinner parties with little kids should really be called dinner events, or dinner chaos, or dinner shenanigans, because the word “party” implies that we all sat down to a leisurely meal with candles, when really we scarfed down food on paper plates while the parents yelled things like, “CLIMB DOWN THE BOOKSHELVES MOLLY, OR YOU’RE GETTING A TIME-OUT!”

Nine kids and two hours later there were smashed vegetables, dried pieces of garlic toast, and wet spaghetti noodles littering every surface of the floor. I remember the door closing behind the last family, locking eyes with Sharon, and audibly announcing that I’d made a very, very big mistake. The chaos terrified me. Were all children this loud and this …messy?

And, speaking of messy—why did children need so much stuff? A few of my friends had turned their living rooms into playrooms, covered with plastic play kitchens and foam play mats, trampolines and train tables, baby swings and ride-on toys, dollhouses and dress-up boxes.  It was horrifying, really, how much equipment these creatures accumulated.

When it came time to register for our baby, I planned to do things differently. We would not be a family whose lives would be dramatically taken over by gear and accessories. No—I planned to be one of those minimal mamas without baby crap covering every spare inch of our tiny 1,000 square foot home. (And God-forbid we would own one of those brightly colored plastic jump stations with all the bells and bead toys.)

Gosh, I was so cute back then.

***

We’re walking back to the minivan—the one I swore I’d never own—when Anna announces that her bottom tooth is hanging by a thread. It’s her first loose tooth and she is bouncing with hopeful anticipation. I ask if she’d like me to pull the tooth. She is resolute and brave; confidently nodding her head and opening wide.

That same baby tooth popped through in January 2012. She was fussy and clingy, burying her head in my chest while she worked through the first physical pain she’d ever really experienced in her short six months of life.  I remember whooping and hollering when I noticed the speck of pearl amongst her swollen gums. “That’s why! That’s why!” I said.

Now she is the one with a prideful grin. She cups the tooth in her hand and shows her baby brother. He’s working on his own first tooth, and he smiles obliviously at her achievement.

It’s only been six years since I became a mom, and in the time it took her to grow a mouth full of teeth I’ve collected two more children, a van, and a house full of kid gear.

“We’ll only need this stuff for a few years,” I once told myself, not realizing that baby gear gets replaced with toddler gear, which gets replaced with a very large shelf of children’s books, Legos, baby doll accessories, a doctor’s kit, Magna Tiles, play dough and a costume box. That cute Pinterest inspired shelf above the crib—how did I not anticipate this?—would eventually be covered in a Kindergarten diploma, a soccer trophy, a piggy bank, and about 25 treasures from Christmas stockings, quarter toy machines, and the prize box at school.

At the baby shower, I could only picture the baby. When the first tooth emerged, I never pictured it falling out.

This week, I got rid of the baby playmat and Bumbo, the breast pump and the Puj tub. When I dropped them off at the Crisis Pregnancy Center, I thought about how panicked I felt upon opening them all those years ago at a baby shower. Visual signs of the impending and permanent changes to come, those baby items felt like weights to my weary first-time mama soul.  They would take over our house, along with the inevitable crumbs and messes to come.  Was I ready for such a change?

The answer is no. No I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready for the mess and the chaos and the very long period of waking up every two hours in the night. I wasn’t ready for the terror of a first fever and learning to nurse on airplanes. I wasn’t ready for her spitting the homemade baby food in my face or biting my nipples. I wasn’t ready for cleaning vomit out of car seats and the deep pain I’d feel when she broke her arm. I definitely wasn’t ready for her brother’s two first years of life when I wore him morning, noon and night.

And that mess under my table? I definitely wasn’t prepared for it. I vacuum several times a day, and the crumbs still bother me. There are some parts of motherhood I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to.

But then there are some things—like her toothless grin—that catch me off guard in a different way. You don’t notice the passage of time when you’re on your hands and knees cleaning up crumbs, but, it’s been happening.

So after all these years of little people messing up my kitchen floors, here's my best unsolicited advice at baby showers:

Motrin for teething babies.
The tooth fairy comes sooner than you think she will.
Look up, Mama. Motherhood is not as messy as it sometimes appears.

Photo by Mary Claire Roman.

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