I’ve been a parent for 6 and a half years, and in that time I’ve accumulated enough knowledge to…well, to fill up about half a blog post. I have two daughters and, while they are my world, they kick my ass every day (twice on Sunday for good measure). There are many days I feel like I’m playing a game where the rules keep changing on me — unless, of course, it’s on one of those days where there seem to be no rules at all. Nevertheless, I have gained some insight (read: jaded observations).

-When I was in college, experience taught me to leave a party twenty minutes early. Nothing good ever happened by staying too long, and that logic applies with kids – I have averted many a tantrum with this tactic. Of course, sometimes the process of extracting my kids takes a half hour, I guess technically we end up leaving later than intended. Regardless, there’s very little difference between an overstimulated toddler and an overserved college student.

-Proceed with extreme caution when reading articles about parenting. I don’t mean to imply that they don’t contain useful nuggets of information. But the typical article has the same effect on me that a Cosmopolitan article on gaining the perfect bikini body has on a 13-year-old girl: it presents an often-simplistic, unattainable ideal and leaves me seriously questioning my parenting mojo rather than affirming it.

-Parenting requires a seemingly limitless reserve of patience; I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find the source of the disconnect that occasionally crops up between myself and my 6-year-old. Then it came to me: I’ve been employed. Working in any sort of professional setting is terrible training for handling a kindergartener. I worked with adults who listened to me and would comply with simple requests! A difference of opinion did not involve tears and proclamations that “Mommy would let me!” (okay, that happened once. Moving on…) The finely-honed skills of delegation, compromise and rationality are completely useless when you’re only trained to use them with people that know what those are.

-News flash: parenting is not fulfilling. Well, not in the movie montage-over-treacly music way we’ve been brainwashed with. The day-to-day drudgery of caring for others who don’t exactly show their undying gratitude for every wiped nose can sometimes overshadow the miracle-in-progress that is a young child. The fulfillment is there in the little moments, such as when they tell knock-knock jokes or ask why daddy needs to drink so much medicine.

-My typical day is often like a day on vacation: I make lots of grand plans to do stuff, but the reality is that I only have the time or initiative to accomplish about a portion of what I’ve planned.

-Do not, under any circumstances, ever leave crayons on the seat of a car in the summer.