Dear BabyCenter, I hate you.

To be fair, I don't hate EVERYTHING about BabyCenter. Just their emails. And it's not that I'm getting them and don't want to...it's that they make me feel bad.

Charlotte is...well, she's my special pork chop, that's for damn sure. She didn't start crawling "on time". She didn't start self feeding "on time". And walking? Let's not go there. Lately I've been trying to pull her into the middle of the room and I yell "Standing is FUN!" and she plops right down on her ass.

*sigh*

And I think, in this generation new moms have it A LOT harder in this respect. There's books. TV shows. DVDs. Online classes. Real life classes. "What your baby should be doing" emails. It's LITERALLY overload.

I'm betting 55 years ago when a kid did nothing but eat bologna slices and chew on their foot for six months nobody thought anything of it. Now your child is...
*suspenseful music*
DELAYED.

Ugh. Delay THIS *jabs her middle finger in the air*.

And THAT is exactly why I stopped reading baby books. And emails. And articles. EVERY LAST ONE of them, I stopped. Why?

Because my daughter is a unique and special snowflake, to say the least. And I was REALLY starting to feel like I was doin' it wrong. Especially the self feeding bit. We tried puffs. We tried piles. I tried a few different things at a time.

No. No. Annnnd no.

Let me break it down for you:

SCENE: Interior kitchen. Charlotte is unhappy and porkily strapped in her high chair with an assortment of multicolored food bits on the tray in front of her. Allison is trying desperately to pry a clenched fist open. Charlotte pulls her fist away, pumps it in the air and howls. Allison sees her opportunity and crams a puff in her open mouth. Charlotte spits the puff out and slams her fist down on it, smashing it to mush.

Lather, rinse and repeat with her squishing them in her fist while crying.

But I digress. Her progress did NOT AT ALL mesh up with the standardized progress charts in any of those books and what not. And it's REALLY hard not to let that get into your brain and start effecting your parenting. You start wondering "What's WRONG with my baby??"

Answer: nothing.

Not a hot damn thing.

So, I stopped reading all those "your baby should be..." updates. And you know what? I feel A TON better about things. Now, if I'm concerned or confused, I ask someone.

But what do you do when the advice is unsolicited? As a mom I never in a million years would think of all the CRAP people have felt validated telling me. About how they raised their children. What they fed them. What do I feed mine? Oh really? Well, I guess it's a different world.

Exactly! It's a different world! People don't eat lard sandwiches anymore! But that too is hard because people mean well, honest they do. But most times I honestly just want to take a hammer to people's faces. So what do you say to them?

Simple, you find your own unique way to say "Wow, that's interesting, but bugger the fuck off."

And it's not easy, it took me many many months to work up the guts to start heatedly defending my child rearing opinions. For example: my mother. For MONTHS every time my mother came over she would say something like "You are STILL breastfeeding her? That is EXACTLY why I didn't with you." Until finally one day I just blurted out "No, it's because you are lazy and selfish and you knew it would be more work than you wanted to provide because you didn't even want the baby in the first place."

BOOM.

Head shot bitch.

And you know what? She significantly stopped her bitching after that. Not completely, but that's Priscilla for you.

So...where am I going with all this? It's one of my more serious posts folks. You just have to learn to find your ground. What's cool for you and what's not. You've got to learn and adjust your parenting style. No book, no article is going to teach you how to do it. And if you want to be a walking library of facts and figures that's awesome.

Just stay the fuck away from me before I take a hammer to your face.