You know what’s fun? A baby shower. You know what’s as much fun? A virtual baby shower! An online baby shower was organized for Liz, Christina, and Tammie and in lieu of gifts, we were all asked to share some of the best advice we ever received and some of the most horrendous “assvice” we ever received.

I think the best advice I ever got was one of the hardest to follow – sleep when the baby sleeps. It was a bit easier with Hayley, because when Breanna was born I couldn’t just go and nap with her since I had to take care of Hayley too. However, even back then it wasn’t always as easy as “oh, she’s asleep, I’ll nap too!” Sometimes it was hard to just shut off and sleep and other times it just wasn’t a convenient time such as when it was time for me to eat lunch. A lot of times I made do with using her nap time to just sit quietly. Since she only really napped ON me for the first several months, that was easy to do. I’d sit at my desk and when she fell asleep I could poke around online or watch TV and not do anything tiring. A lot of times that was good enough for me.

Still, it IS good advice in general and if you can do it, I highly recommend it.

I’m sure I got bad advice, or “assvice” as we like to call it. As many mothers have been told, I was once told by a woman who didn’t even have children that I was going to spoil Hayley because I picked her up as soon as she cried. Never mind that this happened when Hayley was less than three weeks old and had just woken up and was hungry. I was going to spoil her because I didn’t let my tiny baby cry for an hour before tending to her. Right. But you know, that’s all I can remember. That’s not because I never got any, it’s just because I think your sanity requires you to block the crap out.

I can tell you that the weirdest two pieces of advice came from old wives’ tales. One was while I was pregnant and I was told not to reach up for things that were above my head (which is pretty much all our shelves at my short height) because stretching my arms overhead would cause the umbilical cord to wrap around the baby’s neck and strangle her. Uh, what? The other was during those first couple of weeks when babies have their days and nights reversed, and a friend assured me that if we rolled Hayley from one end of the bed to the other and then back again, she would sleep just fine from then on. I, uh, didn’t even bother to test the odd theory.

And if I can just offer one little bit of advice that I think is possibly the most important – enjoy every moment as much as you possibly can. No matter how long the sleepless nights feel, no matter how you feel like this phase or that phase will last forever, in hindsight it’s all so fast and so fleeting. Already I see so much independence from each of them and I know before I know it they’ll both be teenagers who roll their eyes over how ridiculously uncool their parents are and we’ll wish they were tiny newborn babies again who wanted nothing more than to be held close. Hang on and enjoy them because they grow so fast.

Hayley the day after she was born:

Breanna the day she was born: