The one post of mine that still receives the most comments and emails all these years later takes on sleep training. My standard answer to those poor, desperate new moms is that I'm the last person that anyone should ever ask advice about getting one's children to sleep. I've got 1,467 consecutive sleepless nights to prove it. More or less.
Then again, not too long ago, I was the mom of a 2-year-old who was wondering if my friend's 18-month-old needed a blankey on the ground for tummy time when they came to visit.
I know that as parents, we are victims of some strange affliction which causes our children to always seem to have been the very age they are now. With the vocabulary they have now, and the athletic ability, and the emotional intelligence and you know, the haircuts. I look back at photos of my girls from only six months ago and it's hard to imagine that such an age even occurred. It almost seems like my brain simply has no capacity to take on new information, new coping mechanisms and new crisis management skills without letting go of the old ones.
I can take on the mean girl issues, but only because I've more or less forgotten at what age a baby starts walking. Seriously, you could brag to me that your kid started walking at 22 months and I'd be like, prodigy!
These days, I can talk Sage through the complexities of The Lord of the Rings trilogy in language she can understand, but if you ask me what her first words were, I would have to run to my blog and hope that I wrote them down somewhere.
Whatever I seem to be handling reasonably well right now, don't even think about asking me about whether preschoolers are reading, or when a baby starts getting her teeth, or the difference between your sixth and seventh month of pregnancy.
Crap, see? I said sixth or seventh month. Every mother knows that pregnant women think about pregnancy in terms of weeks and totally roll our eyes at anyone who asks us what month we are, because the answer is "38 1/2 weeks and don't make me do more math than that, thanks."
Is it Mom-nesia? Mom-entia? Mom-ory loss? Some other really bad mom pun that someone has probably already trademarked and turned into the title of a failed web series pitch?
Whatever it is, I've got it. I hope I'm not alone here.
Last night on Twitter, someone I don't know asked my advice about what age one should put cereal in a nighttime baby bottle and all I could say was "I'm so sorry, but I don't even know what you're talking about."
This post originally appeared on Mom-101.