The Sh!t No One Tells You
A Guide to Surviving Your Baby's First Year
Author: Dawn Dais
Publisher: Seal Press
Publication Date: June 4, 2013
This is the book I wish I had read when my daughter was first born. Except that I could barely keep my eyes open and I was still convinced that my precious free moments were best spent scrapbooking the precious memories of my baby's new life into an adorable hardcover book that I would proudly show off for an entire week and then never look at again. I was a sleep deprived idiot.
But had I been able to formulate cohesive thoughts during those first few months, let alone process complex sentences, I could have really benefited from this book, with such reassuring chapters as:
- "Breastfeeding is F'n Hard" (it really is);
- "No One is Loving This as Much as Their Facebook Posts Would Have You Believe" (soooo true...if you don't believe me, go back and look at your own Facebook posts from when your child was first born--if your child was born after 2007 of course--and notice the lack of posts that say "that little @#!$ woke me up every 30 minutes for no good reason and I'm starting to suspect it's some sort of personal infant vendetta");
- "Your Newborn is Not Cute" (screw this, mine was adorable! ...sort of);
- "Who Needs a Health Plan When You Have the Internet?" (the internet is hella dangerous to new parents--just ask the very nice nurses at my local emergency room when I brought in my five-week-old because when I took her temperature I thought it was half a degree higher than the other eight times I had taken it that day, and is it possible that she has malaria or scarlet fever or something?); and
- "It Does Not Go By 'Soooo Fast'" (especially those first three or four months...those are like the longest night that never ends...I mean awesome, but also awful...both)
