The Sh!t No One Tells You About Baby #2: A Guide To Surviving Your Growing Family

by Dawn Dais

Overview

The third book in Dawn Dais's popular Sh!t No One Tells You series covers all a parent needs to know once the reality of having two children settles in.

Around the time your first baby turns a year old your brain will turn on you. For reasons that are still not understood by science, the sleep deprivation and postpartum hormones you barely survived with your first baby fade from memory and will be replaced with idyllic images of your growing child.

This is when your brain, having officially lost all regard for your well-being, begins to fantasize about a second baby. And for the first time since becoming a parent these thoughts don't make you break out in hives.

Before you know it, you are dressing your first child in "I'm Going to be a Big Sister!" T-shirts and catalog-shopping for bunk beds. This will be fantastic!

But then that familiar morning sickness kicks in. And your adorable 18-month-old transforms into a two-year-old terror. That's when those hives start to return.

With Dawn Dais's trademark witty banter, The Sh!t No One Tells You About Baby #2 includes chapters such as "You Have Officially Lost Control of the Situation," "Siblings Aren't Nearly as Adorable as You Imagined," "You'll Have a Favorite," and "Having Kids Looks a Lot Easier on TV."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781580056311
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Series:	Sh!t No One Tells You , #3
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	340,896
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Dawn Dais is an author, freelance writer, and designer. Her previous books include The Sh!t No One Tells You series of parenting titles. She lives in Sacramento.

Read an Excerpt

The Shit No One Tells You About Baby #2

A Guide To Surviving Your Growing Family

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By Dawn Dais

Seal Press

Copyright © 2016 Dawn Dais
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58005-631-1

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Now Is the Perfect Time to Become a Hermit
Leaving the house is overrated

Here’s the thing: Amazon Prime has free shipping, and most of the things you order will get to your house in a couple of days. Amazon Now and many grocery stores will deliver essentials to your house within a couple of hours. I highly recommend you familiarize yourself with all of these services immediately. Because leaving the house with multiple children in tow is not recommended by any mental health professional.

You may be thinking that is an exaggeration, but I’m only looking out for you and your children. And for the innocent bystanders who are just trying to grab a bag of salad and don’t need to see all of you huddled on the floor crying in the middle of the produce section. That is when the mental health professionals might have to get involved.

Newborns and toddlers are both just balls of disaster waiting to happen. If you are having an extra-special day you’ll experience both of their disaster skills at the same time. Why on earth would you want to go into public with these kinds of people? At any given moment the toddler can begin to act like a toddler and the baby can start howling. Then you will be forced to leave both of them in the grocery store while you go start a new life in a different city. And we both know you don’t have the energy to create a new identity for yourself, so let’s keep things at a manageable level, shall we?

Your first clue that leaving the house is a bad idea should be the amount of effort it takes to even get out of the damn house. Before your new baby came along you might have started to hit a nice little stride with Child #1 in regard to getting out of the house in an almost functional manner. Sure, the shoes weren’t always on and the child’s hair sometimes looked as if a hurricane had blown by it, but the exit plan was relatively painless and could be pulled off with little to no advanced warning (with an occasional assist from a sugar-laced bribe).

Now that you’ve added another baby to the mix, you’ve also added his or her 6,736,238 required accessories. As well as his or her completely unreliable crying and pooping habits. And (this is the big one) newborns are totally resistant to any and all bribing attempts. We all know your parenting victories begin and end with your ability to bribe children into doing what you want them to do.
But still, you push on. Because there has to be something better out in the real world than baby vomit and Caillou.

You pack up the diaper bag with bottles, cups, wipes, pacifiers, burp cloths, tissues, changing pads, backup clothes, backup clothes for the backup clothes, diapers, blankets, bibs, squeaky squeakers, rattling rattlers, and plenty of sugar-laced bribes. You chase Child #1 around the living room while trying to remind him or her how easy it used to be to leave the house. Child #1 in turn points out that you probably should have spent a little more time on the regression chapters in those baby books you were reading before Child #2 arrived.

You get the baby dressed and snap her into the car seat. Then you finally catch Child #1 and snap him into his car seat. Next you practice your weightlifting and wrestling skills by trying to fit the double stroller into the back of your car, which involves several failed attempts because the ginormous stroller only fits into the back of your car if it is at juuuuuuuuust the right angle. The effort is a nimble and glamorous one for all to witness. Eventually you cram the damn stroller in and violently slam the hatchback on it repeatedly, hoping to jam it into staying where it is.

After this several-minute assault on your automobile and sanity, you give up and grab the Baby Bjorn. You think about grabbing the dog leash for the toddler but realize that might not be legal. By the time you get into the car, both children have gifts waiting for you. The toddler offers you a big fat meltdown that has been caused by being strapped into a chair like an animal for three minutes. And the baby has shat up his or her entire back.

Half an hour, a new outfit, and another round of sugary bribes later, you are back in the car and ready to go. As you pull out of the driveway you glance down at the clock and notice it is five minutes before Child #1’s naptime. Thereby guaranteeing a disaster is imminent from that side of the car. You know this because in your newborn haze you’ve missed Child #1’s naptime four times this week. Each time this has happened, you’ve vowed never to go down that dark road again. But keeping track of what the hell time it is can be difficult when you are barely keeping track of your sanity.

You drive around the block and get a coffee at a drive-thru Starbucks and call it a successful outing. You vow to never speak ill of Caillou and its hypnotizing ways ever again.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Shit No One Tells You About Baby #2 by Dawn Dais. Copyright © 2016 Dawn Dais. Excerpted by permission of Seal Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

My Moms on the Front Lines 5

1 You Are About to Abandon Your Firstborn: This will come up in therapy later 13

2 Baby #1 Will Have No Patience for Your Pregnancy: Less nausea, more hustle, lady 23

3 It's Time to Get Another Watermelon Out of You: D-Day, take two 33

4 Breastfeeding Is Still F'n Hard: Your poor boobs have been through a lot 45

5 Postpartum Is Still Awesome: Now with a confused child audience 59

6 You Have Officially Lost Control of the Situation: A case study in bathing two children 69

7 Now Is a Perfect Time to Become a Hermit: Leaving the house is overrated 73

8 You May Be All Out of Shits: The first kid used them all up 81

9 Your First Child Is Possibly a Psychopath: Jealousy is not a great look on a child 89

10 Your Body Is a Wasteland: Turns out miracles leave a lot of destruction in their wake 99

11 1 + 1 = 54,623,452: The most unfortunate math 109

12 Everything Is So Damn Loud: The only time a hearing impairment comes in handy 119

13 Now You Get to Fail Two Kids Instead of Just One: Plenty of guilt to go around! 125

14 More Kids Means More Spirit Days Proceed with caution 133

15 You Now Have to Feed Two People Who Refuse to Eat You're going to need a lot of chicken nuggets 139

16 You'll Have a Favorite: Start saving for the therapy now 147

17 Siblings Aren't Nearly as Adorable as You Imagined: Sharing is not the easiest concept to grasp, apparently 157

18 You Won't Remember Any of This: You're going to need some Post-its 165

19 People Who Keep Having Kids Just Really Hate Sleep: Or themselves. Or both. 175

20 Having Kids Looks a Lot Easier on TV: Because on TV they are never actually around 181

Epilogue: You Got This 187

Editorial Reviews

"Covers all the basic questions about the differences between having one child and two. It gathers advice from mothers who share the information they wished they'd had before their second child, and it provides anecdotes that are both funny and practical...From changed parenting decision processes to common assumptions about having and handling two children, this book offers a range of thought-provoking insights about the process and how it can better be managed." —Midwest Book Review

From the Publisher