1. You will join numerous parenting Facebook pages and delight in using acronyms including: DD and DS (dear daughter and dear son), OH (other half) etc when trying to stay awake during nightfeeds.
2. Baby wipes clean everything! Bums, hands, faces, chocolate, sick and they even get poo off carpets.
3. Once your baby is six months and you start weaning, your meal will never ever be your own. Be prepared to share! And also be prepared to be fed fistfuls of already-gummed food.
4. You can no longer ‘nip out’. Any trip involves numerous bags containing spare clothes, blankets, toys, snacks, a buggy, a sling, various jackets for changeable weather. You might as well pack your whole house.
5. Motherhood is competitive. FACT. Who got the most sleep, who manages to function best on the littlest sleep, whose child ate the most disgusting/adventurous thing. Be prepared to hear things like ‘last week Bertie wolfed down his kale’ after you just finished describing the previous night’s beans on toast tea.
6. Messy play is a god-send! Giving your little one the chance to express themselves but not have to clean up the mess? Hell yeah!
7. In the early days your baby can quite easily go through ten baby grows in a day, thanks to a combination of poo, sick and your leaky boobs. You meanwhile will wear the same pair of stained joggers and baggy T-shirt for a week.
8. Being woken at 3 am doesn’t seem so bad when you get a big smile from a sleepy newborn, or a clumsy, sloppy kiss from a 14 month old.
9. You will most likely find tinned tuna, noodles, stock cubes, pasta and all other manner of foods strewn round the house — and very often the bath — thanks to a ‘helpful’ toddler.
10. You will have to use your foot to grab your phone/iPad/tv remote/book when you hastily sit down with your baby and have nothing to keep you occupied.
11. You can pretty much tidy your whole house in the short time your baby naps. You essentially become a Super Woman/The Flash hybrid.
12. You get to re-watch your favourite childhood Disney films. It’s all for the kids . . . okaaaaaay then.
