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 Parenting 101 - Parenting Advice
I’m Counting to 10 … Hope and Humor for Frazzled ParentsBy Jahnna Beecham and Malcolm Hillgartner  Welcome to the ClubMalcolm and I want to make one thing perfectly clear. Parenthood took us completely by surprise. We had no intention of having children. We had a great life. Why ruin it? After ten years of marriage without kids, our friends found it extremely amusing that we wound up having not one, but two children. Do you remember those, “Oh, no, I left the baby on the bus!” tee shirts? We were barraged with them. Then, before we could say, “Push!” we joined the We-Never-Sleep parents club. Suddenly we had a minivan littered with Happy Meal containers, melted crayons and discarded clothing items. (We’re past the baby stage, but we still have the suspicion that a bottle of curdled milk lurks somewhere under the back seat.) In those early sleep-deprived days we felt very isolated. We lived way out in the country with our baby daughter Skye, the barf-and-poop machine, and son Dash, poster child for the Terrible Twos. None of our friends had children. And they wanted nothing to do with ours. Every invitation started with, “Can you get a sitter?” We felt like the loneliest people on the planet. It wasn’t until we vacationed at a family camp that we realized we weren’t the only lepers in this colony. I sat around the pool in my floor-length bathing suit with reinforced underwire bra talking to other mothers in the same outfit. We discussed toilet training and time-out. It was like someone opened a window and let in the light. We weren’t terrible parents! Everyone’s kids threw tantrums in grocery stores, ran up and down the aisles on planes, and tried to poke their baby sister’s eye out. We had found our club! Shortly after that, we moved to a small town in Oregon filled with kids, dogs, playgrounds—and friends. Friends who, like us, haven’t read a real book in years. They can sometimes be found behind the wheel at the school’s “hug and go,” still wearing their pajamas. And they are really patient when you call them on the phone and interrupt the conversation every two minutes to yell at your kids. Basically, this book is to let you know that you are not alone. We’re all in this club together. And in our club there are some universal truths: No two kids are alike. There isn’t one right way to be a parent. If you can’t figure it out, consult the experts . . . and most of the real experts don’t have Ph.D. attached to their name. Their professional titles are “Mommy” or “Daddy.” They are next door, or a phone call away in Denver, Minneapolis, South Bend, or Cleveland.
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