Amanda writes at Lilahbility, about motherhood and her gorgeous daughter. But. BUT! Child number two is due any day now! That makes my done-having-kids self giddy. I can’t WAIT to hear all about the newest precious bundle of newborn-ness. But for now, I’m enjoying a trip down memory lane with her oldest girl.

Amanda is just a sweet, lovely person to chat with in the blogging world, and I love reading her posts. She’s funny, she’s Canadian, she’s honest. One of her favorite (or favourite, eh) posts she wrote is this one, and it’s Laugh Out Loud TRUE.

Check out Lilahbility and connect with Amanda, after you read about her expectations and give her some love.

Thanks for being here, Amanda!

I expected to be better at this.

We all think we know what kind of parents we’ll be before we actually have kids.  Before I had Lilah, I had been working with kids for five years. I was well aware that motherhood would be a whole different ballgame and much harder than working with kids in a professional capacity, but I really thought I had a leg up; that I was starting from a position of privilege and inside knowledge.  I knew more about what made kids tick than your average person, I’d had all kinds of courses in child development and psychology, and I had a million tricks up my sleeve for getting them to do my bidding.

I was cocky. “Newborns scare me a bit,” I’d say, “But toddlers and preschoolers I can totally handle.”  As a speech therapist, I work mainly with the two to five set.  Which means I spend my day tricking and bribing young children into making silly sounds or using new words.  They have fun, their parents learn how to work with them at home, and if I do my job well, everyone goes home feeling great about themselves.  Yay, me!

Turns out I made some fatal errors in my reasoning on how this would translate to parenthood.  First of all, to the kids on my caseload, I’m “that-nice-lady-I-play-with-who-always-has-cool-games-and-toys-and-gives-me-stickers-and-pays-attention-and-listens-to-me.”  With my own kid, I can’t be that nice lady all the time.  In fact, we’re lucky if I’m that nice lady for a small portion of each day.  And she can only have my undivided attention in bits and pieces.  Sadly, I don’t get paid to play with her for hour-long chunks of time, and there are a million other things that also need my attention when we’re at home.  (Multiply that by a trillion when baby number two makes his arrival within the next couple of weeks.)

Secondly, other people’s kids don’t have the power to make me as crazy as my own kid does.  Even if they are being total hellions, I know that I only have to deal with them for a short time before I can send them packing.  It’s a lot easier to be patient with a child when your time with them can be counted in mere minutes.  When your own kid is driving you nuts and you still have a whole day stretched out ahead of you… well, we’ve all been there.

Not even three weeks ago, Lilah officially graduated from “toddler” to “preschooler”, and with her new found threedom came all sorts of new challenges.  From both my schooling and my experience with kids, I know that three is a time of high frustration, when the desire for independence clashes with still-limited abilities and tantrums are usually at their peak.  And yet the changes in my child’s behaviour that came seemingly overnight still came as a total shock to me.  All of a sudden, I was the one seeking out the type of advice I dish out to parents on an almost daily basis.

No matter what your area of expertise or your experience, the fact of the matter is that sometimes, when it comes to your own kid(s), you just cannot see the forest for the trees.  I’d be willing to bet my Master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology (sounds kinda fancy, right?) that even the experts whose parenting books I just spent a fortune on in Chapters have had those moments of utter cluelessness as to what to do next; that they’ve allowed their buttons to be pushed; that they haven’t always been entirely consistent; that they’ve snapped and then regretted it.

So yeah, I expected to be better at this. But maybe it’s time to put the expectations aside and recognize that I am doing the best I can with what I have and what I am able to give at any particular moment. Just like anyone else.

Aren’t they adorable?! Follow along with Lilahbility on Twitter (and @lilahbility on Instagram in the hopes of some newborn sweetness soon!).