........that you shouldn't get you hopes up about a day in which you have nothing planned.......because there are no free days when you're a mom.

You might have initially felt a gloomy, rainy Monday the perfect backdrop for accomplishing nothing more than staying in and doing well, nothing. But let me tell you, it's a lost cause. Before you know it you will find yourself chasing a snot-nosed 20 month old around the house, trying in vain to convince her boogies are, number one, not hysterically funny and number two, not a good thing to smear across furniture. Then you will find yourself scrubbing poop stains off the velour toddler outfit that never got dealt with yesterday. The one that your husband actually had to look at, pick up and move so he could get ready for bed the night before. And as you are about to rinse said outfit, in the bathtub you were on your hands and knees scrubbing out not even one week ago, you are treated to the view of a brand new layer of slime and grime and your husbands hair. So leaving the velour outfit for later and the pile of laundry you've previously gathered, you dive right in and begin to, once again, rinse out the tub. But the drain, as you have mentioned to your husband, is quite slow. Soon the tub is filled with not only slime and grime and hair, but a good deal of tepid water. And it is at this moment that your oh so helpful daughter knocks an entire basket of clean folded towels, and her poopy velour outfit, into the stew. You exclaim something along the lines of "Noooooooooo!", which scares her and triggers a torrent of tears. You leave off everything, this time, in favor of comforting her. And if you really had any sense at all it is at this moment that you would admit defeat and abandon the whole mess, leaving it for you husband to take care of when he gets home.

But, of course you don't. Because, by golly, this is your day to do nothing! And you're anxious to start. So you throw in a load of laundry, ring out and hang to drip dry the towels that fell into the bath tub, put the poopy outfit into a bucket of soapy water to soak, add more water and bleach, to the still un-drained bathtub, finish the batch of pumpkin muffins you foolishly undertook somewhere before all this, feed your daughter her belated breakfast and in between each activity, wipe, wipe, wipe her running nose.

By now, it is 11:00. Which, when you realize it, begs you to ask one all important question; what are you going to do with all the time you have left before your parents arrive for lunch?

.......that even when you know you're doing the right thing as a parent, you still feel like a big jerk.

I could actually just leave things there and everyone in the world who is a parent would know exactly what I'm talking about. It's one of the many rather disconcerting little surprises you stumble upon sometime after having your own child. No one warned you about it. Not really. Sure you heard you own parents often say things like....."this is harder for me that it is for you" when they punished you. Or....."this is hurting me as much as it's hurting you" when they spanked you. And you never thought they were lying, necessarily. You maybe just figured they were merely trying to make you feel better.

But let me tell you, they weren't. They were trying to make themselves feel better. Because I have discovered......20 months into this parenting thing......IT SUCKS.

You know you have to discipline. You know you cannot let them have their way all the time. You know you have to be firm and ignore the whining and the tears and yes, the inevitable screaming. But even the un-shakeable knowledge, buried deep in the back of your mind, that you are doing the right thing, is absolutely meaningless in the moment. You feel guilty. You feel mean. You feel like a terrible, terrible person. And unlike your child's feelings, which will do a complete 180 in 2 seconds, yours linger. For hours. For days.

You have to learn not only how to talk your child through the appropriate discipline process, you have to learn to talk yourself through it as well; which is exactly where the whole..... "this is as hard on me....." speech comes in. I don't know if I'll ever say those words to E when she gets bigger. Maybe. I heard it and never got it so I hold out little hope for her. But someday when she's a mom and she calls me, fighting tears, to say how hard it is to put her screaming toddler down for a nap and just walk away, I say "I know honey, I know." And I truly, truly will.

.....the unwritten rules governing proper facebook etiquette. But someone really should. So here we go.

#1. If it requires more than ten sentences to get your point across, no one is going to sustain interest long enough to get to the end of your ramblings. They are called status updates. Not "all that I did today" short stories!

#2. If they are just a way for you to brag about yourself, people will see right through it. And get annoyed. Really, you may have just nailed the most amazing job interview ever, but if you think you've been subtle about blowing your own horn, you probably haven't.

#3. If you're going to gush on and on about your incredible love life, you genius children and your super, duper friends, do all your facebook "friends" a favor and invest in a private journal.

#4. No one really cares to hear all about your deep seeded anger issues when it comes to politics. Okay, so you have an opinion and you want to share it, fine. But if it involves the words "morons, conspiracy and someone should stage a protest rally", there are websites out there you'd be better off saving those intellectual gems of insight for.

#5. If you can't spell and are too lazy to heed the squiggly red lines that show up to supposedly idiot-proof your update, you don't belong on the Internet. Period.

#6. If you can't update the world about your life without dropping the F bomb, get a life. Because we are all assuming you don't have one if your use of the English language is that limited.

#7. Finally, if you must use inane, trendy abbreviations, save them for text messages. If you cannot resist smiley and/or frown face signs, save them for your comments to other peoples posts. If your own post is ambiguous enough that it's readers won't be able to ascertain your mood with out you providing a little colon-and-parenthesis-combo clue, reword your post.