Judy - A New Series of Posts about Parenting #1

   

Years ago, when I was in the middle of my child-raising years, I wanted to write a book about my experiences. When I started having babies, I thought I'd have two or three, like normal people. But somewhere along the way I lost all control and any sense of responsibility and ended up with nine kids. Therefore, after 30 years of newborns, toddlers and teens, not to mention being pregnant for seven and a half years, I've had lots of experience. I was going to call the book,  "Rainbows Over the Diaper Pail: A Mother of Nine Shows How to Raise Awesome Children."

I was going to explain that I'd dealt with everything from the baby's first fall to falling out of trees, from bee stings to lice to pinworms, from sibling rivalry to sibling revolt. Sometimes I experienced the whole gamut of childhood in one day—just as the current baby was sleeping through the night, 2:00 am found me in the high school parking lot waiting for the band to come home. I knew I was good at what I did because my children all turned out to be bright, happy, responsible people who never required me to post bail.

The book was never published because life happened along the way and now, somehow, I'm a grandmother of forty. But I still have my notes and this blog so I'm going to combine the two in the hope that somebody somewhere can benefit from my hard-won wisdom. In the next post we'll start at the beginning and talk about the consequences of conception—pregnancy.