Happy Bank Holiday Monday Folks. Today we are bringing you a light hearted guest post from Kirsty Smith and her hilariously funny book ‘How to have a baby and not lose your s**t!’. We all know having kids isn’t exactly the perfect rose tinted experience we expected. If it is we salute you! If you want a dose of real family life that brings a smile to your face then this is it. Enjoy.

Before I had children, I had a clearly defined list of things I thought were good parenting practice and things I thought were bad. The two were clearly delineated and obviously I would be doing all the good things – breastfeeding, baby-led weaning, learning through play – and none of the bad things – feeding them Haribo for breakfast, using the television as a babysitter, locking myself in the toilet and crying because I was bored off my tits. Before I had children, I was an idiot.

Now I have children I am still an idiot but I have less free time to reflect on this, which works out well for everyone. There were certain things I assumed would happen when I started a family. No one actually sat me down and said these things would happen but I had seen them played out so often I just assumed they had some basis in fact. Idyllic scenes of family life are used to sell us mortgages, yoghurts and air fresheners. We see scenes of family perfection on television and in films starring Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz and they’re all total bollocks. Seriously, The Lord of the Rings is a more realistic portrayal of parenthood; in fact swap the One Ring for a ride-on-PoliceCar and you’ve got the plotline for every stay and play session I’ve ever been to. Here are some scenes you might recognise and some you won’t. Yet.

Preparing for baby: sunlight streams through an open window onto a cot with a mobile hanging over it; mum-tobe (heavily pregnant wearing dungarees) paints the walls a shade of pastel; future dad playfully dabs paint on her nose, they hug and look around the room misty-eyed, imagining all the wonderful things that will happen there.
Reality Check: Mum-to-be is fat; sweaty, wearing leggings because Alexa Chung and the skinny girls now own all the dungarees. She sits on the floor of a spare bedroom piled with boxes and boxes of shit that need sorting/throwing out. Future dad is gripping onto a surfboard he bought whilst travelling, a surf board that has fallen on and injured every single person who has ever stayed in the spare room, a surf board which he thinks will make a ‘nice feature’ one day. It will not. (Unless he is planning on turning the spare room into a fantasy cocktail bar with a tropical beach theme rather than an actual nursery for an actual baby.) Both of you look around at all the rest of the crap in boxes you still have to argue about, bleary eyed, whilst imagining each other dead.

Saturday Morning: Mum wakes in bed, hair artfully dishevelled, sunlight streams through a window; she sees perfect dad bringing in a tray with coffee and the paper. Cute toddler carries a handpicked bloom from the garden ‘For you Mummy!’ They all sit up together with baby in beautiful crisp, white sheets and plan a fun-filled weekend together whilst nibbling bagels.
Reality Check: Christ where to start with this one? Mum opens her eyes and sees toddlers face staring directly into her own demanding she puts on Peppa Pig. It is still pitch black because it’s 4am. Perfect Dad is missing, I mean actually missing. His side of the bed is empty but also mysteriously moist and smelling of sick. Mummy stumbles downstairs to find Daddy already half-asleep on the floor while the baby is sat in front of the telly. Everyone squashes under a duvet on the sofa and watches episodes of Peppa Pig eating cereal straight from the box. Repeat every weekend.

First Christmas: Basking in the festive glow of a roaring open fire, Daddy lifts up his precious baby girl to place the angel she made at Craftytime on top of the tree. Mummy and Daddy share a romantic kiss over a glass of Prosecco and start making plans for baby number two.
Reality Check: Are you mental? An open fire and a baby in the same room? Plus Daddy got overexcited at his first family Christmas and brought home a tree two feet taller than the lounge, someone (Mummy) has thrown away all the boxes of tree decorations in the great nursery purge and the angel that Daddy is so proud of was mostly made by a 60-year-old church volunteer. The entire festive season is spent trying to stop baby from climbing the tree and looking at photos from your old works’ Christmas do on Facebook.

Basically nothing I thought about having a baby came true, there are many moments of perfection but there are also moments when you look at your partner and want to kill him although I think this probably happens even if you don’t have children. So, really, what have you got to lose?
Having children turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done, what I hadn’t expected was the amount of fun involved, not boring fun like looking at a baby gurgling in a cot but actual proper fun like watching an 18-month-old walking repeatedly into a wall with a plastic bucket jammed on his head.

Most parents of new-born babies have a terrified, exhausted look as though they have spent the night in a haunted house. What you don’t get to see from the outside is the immense feeling of love that a parent has for their children. You don’t fall in love with your own children like you do with other people, they just rock up one day and it’s a done deal. Basically becoming a parent is a massive mind fuck which you cannot really prepare for – a bit like one of those crazy parties where everything happens; everyone who went feels like death, someone books a foreign holiday with a complete stranger, and none of you can really explain what happened to people who weren’t there, but everyone knows it was worth it.

Before I had children I assumed you had to be ‘into babies’ to enjoy being a mum but the surprising truth about becoming a mother is that you can actually be a bit ‘meh’ about children and still go on to enjoy being a parent. Holding your cousin’s baby at a wedding and secretly wanting to swap it for a full glass of champagne after 20 seconds does not mean you’re not good with babies. It just means there is champagne. Champagne trumps babies every time. Why do you think Mum is passing the baby around in the first place?