A friend asked me over the weekend how I manage to juggle everything I do and find time to write on a daily basis.  She was envious, she told me, of how I carved out blocks of time during the day to write.  But I set her straight right away by telling her that I don't at all have the writing life she imagines: hours to myself holed away in some quiet room of my own (ha--wouldn't that be a dream!).

New parents always receive way more unsolicited sleep advice than they ever want or need, I think. For instance, when our son was only one-month old his pediatrician at the time gave us, two brand-new parents, the following advice (and there we were seated in front of her like naughty kids facing the school principal):

You can cuddle him and hold him and spoil him now, but once he turns about three months old you need to teach him some independence—particularly with his sleep habits. 

Dinner preparation is chaos, usually. Five p.m. is universally recognized by parents to be some type of witching hour, during which kids become possessed by some tiny but fierce inner demons (I imagine them looking like the Mucinex creature), and melt down, whine, cling to legs, and demand unreasonable things; pots boil over, the oven is always too hot, the dog barks at nothing and altogether too many tasks are being crammed into too short a period of time.