Nobody knows more about raising a child than someone without a child. Trust me, before Grafton I was the greatest mother of all time. I had a list of things I was never going to do. To name a few;

He was never going to sleep in our bed.

He was never going to eat directly off the table. 

And he was never going to control us, he was going to cry it out. 

Grafton slept smack dab in the middle of us every night until about six months ago. And boy am I so glad we finally kicked him out, Garrett and I have conversations before bed and on a good night we make it through a whole movie. However, when we brought him home from the hospital he felt safest up against me at night and if that meant I slept an extra 30 minutes to an hour then by God he slept in the bed. For an entire year, but that’s besides the point. 

Have you ever been at a restaurant blowing on food frantically because as each second passes so does your peaceful meal? Because your beautiful child sitting beside you is going to lose his freaking mind if he doesn’t get one of those French fries into his cute chunky cheeks? Have you? I challenge you to try handing that child a glass plate or a napkin with piping hot food he can’t eat yet. Im putting that food straight on the table for fear of getting kicked out of a restaurant and I don’t care what bacteria he is collecting. 

This last one cracks me up, we live in a 3 bedroom home, meaning we don’t have the space to let Grafton “cry it out.” Sure we can turn up the TV louder or I can read the same sentence over and over again trying my hardest to finish a chapter in my book. The screaming will be like back ground music right? And for the parents that have mastered this, I applaud you. Grafton’s longest “crying it out” was an entire hour and did he fall asleep at the end of that? No, I went and got him because who in their right mind can listen to screaming for an entire hour? Not me.

I can’t speak for every mother and nor am I trying to. There are books that have sold thousands of copies, filled with methods on how to raise a child and they are excellent and for some people these methods work! I’ve always wanted to be this mother, the kind that reads a book and knows everything, but the truth is I’m not. I’m not the perfect mother and I’ll still bite my tongue when it comes to certain things, but the difference is I’ve learned to bite my tongue. There is no one way to raise a child. 

All I ask readers, for those of you about to have a child, thinking about having a child, or maybe not having a child any time soon, never say never. It’s great to have a plan, dreams, even hopes for how you’ll be as a parent. But from all of us out in public about to pass out from blowing on a French Fry, we had those dreams too. We had those plans and life got in the way. My life is beautiful, the chaos is wonderful, my kid is awesome, and no book or person can tell me I’m wrong.