1. Compared to before you had children, it will take you twice as long to get out the door to go somewhere. The time increases exponentially with additional children.

2. You will have one-tenth as many opportunities for sex, and you’ll be too tired or irritated to take advantage of most of them.

3. Your house will never be completely clean again because the minute you finish cleaning one room and move on to another, your children will go into the first room and spill juice or Cheerios, get out a game or puzzle with 1000 pieces, or, better yet, throw up.

4. The kitchen will become your prison; the moment you have all the dishes in the dishwasher, the floor swept and the counters wiped, your child will announce that he’s hungry.

5. You will no longer eat hot food because whenever you sit down to eat, your child will need a new diaper, a refill on juice, or help cutting their food. Very often, they will need all of the above at the same time. If you have more than one child, you may not eat at all.

6. Even if you do manage to lose all your baby weight, you will not look the same as you did before you had children. You will have no time to do your hair or put on makeup; your clothes will all have stains of various hues. Many days, you will not even have time to take a shower.

7. Forget sleep. One of your children will be sick or experiencing nightmares almost every night. And if they do manage to sleep through the night, you won’t sleep anyway because you’ll be waiting for them to wake up, and you’ll be worrying about all the things you didn’t get done for tomorrow.

8. You will no longer be able to just watch the news. Every violent crime or natural disaster that is reported will send you into an emotional tailspin as you start worrying about the safety and well-being of your own children.

9. However many children you have, multiply it by two. That is how many children will be in your home at any one time once they start school and start having friends over.

10. You know how you can’t wait for your kids to be in school full-time so that you’ll have more free time? Forget it. Having kids in school means doing homework (yes, you too), chaperoning field trips, packing lunches, dealing with fundraisers, attending open houses and parent-teacher conferences, going through backpacks every night, and managing mountains of papers that get sent home daily.

11. You will reach levels of frustration of which you did not even know were capable as your little one’s favorite word becomes “NO!”

12. You will receive loads of advice, especially from people who do not have children.

13. You will need to go back to school to get a degree in engineering so you can figure out how to extricate their toys from the “childproof” packaging, how to set up their stroller, and how to put their car seat in correctly.

14. Every “expert” will give you a different opinion on every aspect of your child’s life. No matter what you feed your kids, how you put them to sleep, what toys you give them, you’ll be doing it all wrong.

15. You will become an expert on poop.

16. You will know more about Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer and Buzz Lightyear than about fashion, sports or current events.

17. You will be able to recite “Green Eggs and Ham” (or some other Dr. Seuss masterpiece) by heart.

18. The old saying, “Father works ‘til set of sun, but Mother’s work is never done,” is pure, unadulterated truth.

19. Remember those grandparents who were so excited about having grandbabies?  They’ll have plans every Friday and Saturday night and will, therefore, be sadly unavailable to babysit.

20. You’ll adore your children, but you’ll constantly wonder, “What would life have been like if we hadn’t had any?!”

I’ve been awake for just over 1 hour, and already I’m sympathizing with Andrea Yates.

It’s a school day, so I had to get up and get my kids ready. No problem. I tossed on some workout pants, a t-shirt, a baseball cap, and my flip-flops, and I was the picture of fashion. I headed downstairs to put my son’s lunch into his lunchbox (he refuses to eat the school lunches) and found his homework, undone, sitting on the counter. Realizing I needed some extra time to help him finish that, I raced through the kitchen, making hot chocolate, grabbing Pop-Tarts, and pouring cereal into car-friendly containers. Then I ran upstairs, turned the corner, hooked my hip on the corner of the stairwell and knocked a bag off the shelf. I rubbed my hip and snatched the bag off the floor. Just looking at this particular bag made me mad: it contains cargo pants that I bought for my husband; they were too long, so I exchanged them. Then they were too tight. I told my husband he can take them back, and he was irritated and told me not to bother buying him clothes anymore. I won’t. At least until he starts complaining again about his pants having holes in them.

I went in to wake up my son. My son’s a very good kid but not in the morning. He’s just not a morning person; he gets that from me. This morning, however, he was particularly whiny, especially when I told him we needed to do his homework. He started kicking every unfortunate piece of furniture in his path until he stubbed his toe. Then he began to cry in earnest. I managed to get him dressed and brushed and installed him downstairs with his breakfast and homework.

My baby girl’s not all that fussed about mornings either. Plus, she’s been coughing all night the past few nights. So when I walked into her room to get her up, she immediately started crying, “no, no, no.” I wrestled her into her clothes, wetted down her unruly curls and took her downstairs.

At that point, our neighbor girl popped in to ride with us to school. I noticed she was wearing a jacket and asked her about the weather. She said it wasn’t cold, but I asked my son if he wanted his jacket. No, he said, he didn’t want it. I checked his homework and threw it into his bookbag, then started herding the three kids into the van. We’d taken four steps outside when my son started whining about being cold. Of course, my little girl had to chime in, “Jacket! Jacket!” I told them I’d get their jackets once they were all in the car and buckled up. My son also announced that he had a headache and needed some Tylenol. Fine.

I got them into the van, then ran in and grabbed jackets, a Tylenol and a cup of soda. The microwave clock said we were supposed to be leaving…NOW! I raced back outside, tossed the jackets to the kids, and handed the soda and Tylenol to my son. I shut the door and got into my seat just in time to hear my daughter start a coughing fit. She coughed so hard, she threw up all over herself. Cheerios and hot chocolate. It smelled great. My son and his friend started gagging.

I ran back into the garage and grabbed an old towel out of a box of rags. I cleaned her up as best I could, trying to calm the two older kids down so they wouldn’t throw up too. Then I jumped back into the driver’s seat and promptly backed up over the trash cans that the garbage men had so kindly put right behind the corner of my van. I got out for the third time, tossed the cans into the yard and proceeded to drive the kids to school. We were a couple minutes later than usual, but we were still in the middle of the drop-off line.

When we pulled around in front of the doors, I jumped out and let the kids out. Our neighbor girl hopped out and bopped away, but my son took his sweet time getting out, then announced that he wanted his jacket on. So I’m trying to get his jacket on him and hand him his backpack, which is rather heavy today since it’s full of library books because it’s library day. He’s whining about being cold and his heavy backpack, and we’re holding up the entire line of cars, and one of the teachers hurries over to help. I was mortified. The very sweet teacher hustled him off so I could get back in the car and pull forward. I’ve never been so happy to get rid of my son.

The instant we pulled away, my daughter started crying for her brother. I was so busy trying to calm her down that I nearly blew a stop sign and got flipped off by a lady driving one of those short buses for one of the daycare centers. Classy. I’m glad my kids don’t go to daycare.

My little girl’s going through this cute little phase where she asks for something, you give it to her, she screams, you take it away, she screams again. During our 8-minute trip back home, she pulled this stunt three times - with her sippy cup, a blinking ice cube toy, and a piece of gum. We got into the house and I gratefully abandoned her to Blue’s Clues. Thank God for Joe and Blue.

Did I mention I haven’t even had a cup of coffee yet?

Every year around this time, I start rethinking my choice of religion.

It actually begins around Halloween when sadistic retailers begin putting out Christmas decorations in an attempt to entice shoppers into boosting lagging October sales. Seeing Christmas trees in October sends me into a panic attack. As a type-A person, I am always sure that I’ve forgotten something, that I’m missing something, that I’m behind. When all those yuletide trimmings start popping up, I am in an instant tizzy: Has everyone else started their shopping already?!

It just gets worse from there. My children see the trees and pictures of Santa and television commercials advertising holiday sales, and they start their Christmas begging. My parents and in-laws begin sending me e-mails and calling me to find out what is on everyone’s wish lists. Every friend and acquaintance I have suddenly needs to put an event on my calendar. There are decorations to be hung, cards to be sent, parties to attend, cookies to bake, and dinners to prepare.

And there’s all the silly little things that shouldn’t matter, but they do because Christmas comes only once a year. See, we have all this stuff, and it’s stuff that we have to use in the month of December because using it in May or June would be weird and/or depressing. First, there’s clothes and jewelry - Santa sweatshirts, snowflake sweaters, red and green plaid skirts and blazers, jingle bell earrings. I have to go through my closet and pull out all these items to make sure I wear them or they’ll just sit for another year, collecting dust. Then there are books to read, especially Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” my all-time favorite book that I have read every year since I was about 10. 

Finally, there are CD’s, MP3’s, videos and DVD’s. I have to hunt down all my music and movies that we must listen to or watch now or wait another year. And the collection is getting ridiculous, especially the movies: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas,” “A Christmas Story,” “Elf,” “Mickey’s Christmas Carol,” “Rudolph,” “Frosty,” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

There’s just one other thing that makes my Christmas less than merry. The imbalance between what my female friends and I are doing and what my husband, my father and their guy friends are doing to prepare for the holidays. Don’t get me wrong: my husband and my dad are both wonderful men, and I adore them. But when they say, “Why are you so stressed? Everything will be fine even if you don’t get all that stuff done,” I want to scream! They do little, if any, shopping, wrapping and cooking. If it were up to them, no cards would be sent, no decorations would be hung (except maybe the outside lights which is their responsibility, but they have to be hounded into putting them up). Christmas would be like any other day. So how can they wonder why I’m stressed? Do they really think everything would be just fine even if all their women did nothing to prepare? Argh.

So now it’s two weeks before Christmas, and I’m only about a third done with shopping. I have two dinners I have to attend tonight, so I’ll be leaving one early to get to the other one late. My son is attending two parties and throwing another one at our house. We ordered our Christmas cards online two weeks ago, but they haven’t arrived yet, so I’ll be rushing to get those out the minute they come in. Yet another joyful, peaceful, relaxing holiday season.

If it weren’t for Jesus being such a great guy who deserves a really great birthday, I think I’d go Buddhist. At least for the month of December.

I have a lot of ex-boyfriends.

In fact, I have so many ex-boyfriends, I wrote an entire book about them. There is an art to being an ex-girlfriend, and I have always prided myself on being a pretty darn good one. I am actually friends with most of my exes. One of them introduced me to my husband and was best man in our wedding. Another helped his mother make my wedding cake, and several others were in attendance at the ceremony. Many of my exes are e-mail correspondents; others I see during the holidays at various get-togethers. I can honestly say that I hold no grudges against any of my exes, and I feel I’ve always treated them well.

Except one.

My last long-term boyfriend before my husband (I’ll call him Jay) was a college student working his way through school when we dated. He wanted to be a high school math teacher and football coach. We were a bad match from the beginning, but for various reasons, we ended up staying together for almost two years. When it was finally over, we didn’t see much need to keep in touch. Although I heard of him through mutual friends, I didn’t speak to him or even see him for many years. To be honest, Jay hadn’t crossed my mind in a very long time.

Last night my sister told me he had cancer.

Today, I’ve thought of little else but Jay. Things I hadn’t thought of in years have been running through my mind all day. The way he used to order his McDonald’s cheeseburgers without pickles so he could be sure they’d make them fresh. The really stupid, inappropriate “gifts” he used to give me simply because he got them free from the hardware store he worked at. The night we were taking a walk in Florida and ran across an armadillo; Jay took its picture, and the animal got confused by the flash and ran toward Jay, who bolted in terror, leaving me laughing hysterically.

We all have friends who leave our lives for one reason or another. Sometimes they move away; sometimes you just lose touch because you grow apart. I don’t know about others, but I’ve always put those lost friends in a special place in my head. I pack them away and assume that they’re okay, that they’re happy and healthy and safe. It is a very odd feeling, one I have literally never experienced before, to know that someone who was once very close to you, perhaps closer than anyone else on the planet, is gravely ill. Although we have not spoken to each other in almost a decade, Jay and I were once rather crazy about one another. Strangely, I had forgotten all about that in the past ten years. It saddens me that it would take a tragedy for me to finally see the value of it.

For so many women today, being an ex-girlfriend means being bitter, angry, and tough. The women’s movement taught us that we don’t need men to feel good about ourselves, but a strange side effect seems to have been that we dismiss the whole relationship when one goes sour. Rather than admit there were parts of it that we liked (which might be construed as weakness), we toss out the whole thing. I didn’t do that with my other exes, but I did with Jay.

Although I wish it could have come about differently, I’m grateful that this has allowed me to see our relationship from a completely new perspective. Jay and I did have some fun together. He made me laugh. Most of the time, he made feel very good about myself. He was a hard-working, ambitious guy who didn’t always have a lot of time for romance. But we taught each other a lot, and I can now say that I’m glad we dated.

I hope he feels the same. And I hope he’s alright. For as my mother always said, “All relationships end except the last one.”