1. Why you never say the word "hair" at the table while a toddler is eating.
2. How to make the one last baby wipe in the container do things one poor lonely wipe was never intended to do.
3. The complex mechanics, athleticism and grace required to cradle a sanity-saving cup of coffee in one hand while backing through a narrow doorway, holding the door open with your rear end, all while steering the stroller one-handed and herding a second (and possibly third and fourth, God help us) child(ren) with a spare pinky finger.
4. Diaper pails do not work, no matter how expensive they are, or how extravagant their claims about how the aerodynamic pail also serves as a night light, smoke detector and life raft, and how it can count the number of dirty diapers in Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, and trap odor and lock it inside a fresh-scented bag. Fresh-scented, my foot. Fresh as a landfill in July.
5. Dirty laundry breeds in the night.
6. There is no need to rinse off a pacifier that falls to the ground, unless other people are around to watch you and judge your parenting.
7. All those "experts" who claim they know how to get kids to eat a well-rounded diet filled with exotic organic vegetables every color of the rainbow are either a) lying, or b) engaging in dangerous force-feeding behavior, most likely involving pliers.
8. Those white outfits we can't resist buying our children because they look oh-so-adorable in family beach photos... yeah, they'll only be worn once. After that, they'll be brown and white polka-dotted outfits. (We understand this... but still we buy them. Blame your friends' daggum beach photos.)
9. You should never sniff or lick any brown substance you find on your kitchen table, even if you're sure it is chocolate pudding. (Yep. Learned this the hard way.)
10. The kids' rooms in Pottery Barn catalogs are fake, uninhabited rooms. It is highly possible that the children in Pottery Barn catalogs are also fake.
11. There's no point in putting shoes on a baby before you drive somewhere -- unless you like getting places and discovering that your baby is barefoot and your car has eaten one of the shoes. (If you're lucky, the shoe will reappear one day, but only after your child has outgrown it.) And the same principle holds true for hair bows.
12. The person who invented baby vitamin drops had no taste buds, and thought babies are stupid. The stuff tastes like motor oil. No self-respecting infant will eat it.
13. Your own mother was a really smart woman after all. (This one's not ridiculous -- just true.)
A version of this post was first published on http://LizzyLife.com.