When I had my daughter I remember looking down at my newborn and thinking there’s a reason God made babies ridiculously cute. So we wouldn’t give them away. Or eat them. Because having a kid is like the hardest thing on earth. I mean yeah it’s super rewarding and you can’t help but loving them to pieces, but no one ever tells you before you have kids just how difficult it’s going to be.

And you’d never know it from looking at Facebook or Pinterest. You’d think that having kids is all hunky dory and awesome and smiley, like unicorns flying over rainbows. Wait, unicorns don’t fly. Fine, unicorns with wings. But I digress.

So this is why I wrote this book. To let parents everywhere know that they are not alone. That parenting is hard for everyone. Being preggers, breastfeeding, tantrums, explosive blowout diapers, bedtimes, naptimes, scraping projectile vomit off the ceiling, scraping projectile poop off the wall, the terrible twos, the terrible threes, the terrible fours, etc etc etc.

Okay, pardon me while I get all serious for a moment here. Picture a mom who just had a baby for the first time. Her hormones are bouncing off the walls like a pinball machine that’s being played by a kid who just chugged four Red Bulls, her nipples feel like they’re being eaten by fire ants, and her new baby hasn’t let her sleep more than two straight hours in the past three weeks. This little tiny being is constantly with her, and yet she’s never felt so alone. This is the reason I wrote this book.

Picture a mom standing in the middle of a supermarket where her kid is literally going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs because she won’t buy them, and everyone in the store is staring at her like she is the worst parent on earth. This is the reason I wrote this book.

Picture a mom looking at the clock figuring out that she has exactly 84 minutes until her husband comes home from work. Or a dad knowing he has exactly 176 days until his wife comes home from Afghanistan. Or a mom doing it all alone day after day after day because she’s single. This is the reason I wrote this book.

Kids are awesome. We love them to death and once we have them we can’t imagine life without them. But they’re also little a-holes who torture us on a daily basis and make us feel like we’re doing it all wrong. This is the reason I wrote this book. To make people laugh and feel a little less alone in the impossible, awesome, horrendous, amazing, challenging, exciting, disgusting, unbelievable job of being a parent.