Eliana Osborn

When did I discover that sterilization isn’t as cut and dry as it seems? While sitting in a hospital gown, signing my life away, awaiting surgery.

The other magical thing about living in 2015 is the Internet. You can get great training in all kinds of fields while sitting in your underwear at home.

Kirk Cameron in all his Growing Pains glory was the ideal crush. Unthreatening, goofy, good kid with very reasonable weekly conflicts. And a good smile. Always been a sucker for that.

I get how we want to make our kids successful and everything, right from the start. Feeding into the pressure, here’s the tagline from Starling’s company: “The world’s first word-tracking system that can improve your child’s trajectory for life.”

You know how someone can give you a compliment that you know isn’t true? Like, they tell you a dress looks good when you are absolutely certain that is not the case? But if they keep saying it looks good, you start to think “Yeah... this looks good.”

I’m not there yet. But I need to be honest—I’m closer to 40 than any other multiple of five.

Size, like age and salary and whatever else, is just a number. Pretending numbers don’t measure things isn’t helpful. I’m 38 years old: That isn’t good or bad, but it IS different from being 18 or 50.

Sometimes the nicest kids turn into whole new people when they come over to your house.

Don’t listen to horror stories about airplane tantrums. Listen to me while I let you in on the secret perks of seeing the world with kiddos.

After years in apartments that should have been condemned, even these sad restroom facilities were vast improvements. And so we stayed, the husband and I, vaguely embarrassed when guests stayed over and commented on the bordello vibe of the bathroom.

Then we had a kid. No working bathtub suddenly seemed like a big deal. And the functional bathroom spaces weren’t places you’d want to hang out. There’s a lot of bathroom time once you’ve got tiny humans. (You’ve been warned.)