Well, your friends definitely aren't lying to you-- just about everything you said about the early months is, while I know this peice was intended as comedy, true. My baby is four months old. The first week I cried every day. I was not prepared, although I am not sure if I'd had friends like yours that I would have really understood how hard it was until I lived it. You know what kicked my ass the most? Breastfeeding and sleep loss. I am sure you've heard about these over and over but let me tell you, focus your attention on those two issues and drop the rest of it. Everyone tells you how wonderful breastfeeding is, but when you do it, you are signing up for serious pain and discomfort in the early days and a wall-to-wall night and day commitment in the early months. Mercifully, you get good at it after awhile. As for sleep loss? You never get good at it. It takes a little peice of your life force every single day, and it goes on and on.

However, your baby will be a gorgeous little doughnut who you will love with the fire of 1,000 suns and you will not for a second think of him/her as a lamprey or one of these other ridiculous reductive child-free type labels for babies. You won't want to be away from the baby for a second, and suddenly the attachment parenting weirdness won't seem so weird.

Best of luck to you!

Hee hee, there's a nice example of childless hubris, someone watching a few episodes of "Nanny 911" and thinking this provides an informed perspective on raising kids. That's what I'm talkin' about!

I guess I don't get why some childless folks can't acknowledge that all decisions include tradeoffs-- including theirs. Being childless provides a great chance to be environmentally responsible and use your time to fulfill your own interests -- helping others, art, education, travel, etc. But the one thing you don't get is experience raising a child-- the joy, the frustration, the pain. Why not accept that with grace? Why try to denigrate parents and presume knowledge you don't have? I think that discussing parenting issues is something anyone can participate in, I just think that childless folks need to realize that they are not speaking from first-hand experience, and that watching "Nanny 911" doesn't exactly provide a deep and nuanced perspective of daily life with a child. Thus, childless people's heated opinions on breastfeeding and things of that nature just don't carry a lot of informed relevance. The Senate example works fine here-- a senator would have a much more informed opinion on the workings of the senate than a random person off the street. Both are free to discuss their opinions in a public forum, but forgive me if I give the senator's more weight on the subject of the senate.

Ok, this is totally off topic. My bad. Personally I think Campbell Brown has more "gravitas," and I can't imagine why the parenthood status of news reporters is relevant-- their news stories are not their personal opinions.

That is why she got the job.

Jpentacost-- I completely agree. Whether one has kids or not has no relevance to reporting news stories, but in general, non-parents do not understand parenting as well as they think they do. I know; I used to think I did too, until I became a parent. It's a profoundly humbling experience. Staying childless is a sound choice in a lot of ways, but one thing it does not afford you: an informed opinion about raising children. You can't have it all.

Judith Woodburn is a brave lady for writing an article about breastfeeding in Salon, since 99% of the clowns that overpopulate its letters section have never breastfed, know absolutely nothing about it, and yet strangely, have very pointedly negative and amusingly ignorant opinions on the subject. I recently got into a discussion with some people about breastpumps in Broadsheet, and every person I spoke to seemed very firm on where or how it was appropriate to do it at work, yet had not one clue how long it took, what it entailed, what a breast pump looked like. Yet strangely, all of them seemed to feel they were experts in recommending (or denying) the appropriate environment in which to do it. It really astounded me that they were wasting time breathing fire on this topic, when they were so totally free of any knowledge about it.

If you are one of these opinionated rubes, I ask you: why do you read articles on breastfeeding? Why do you have pointed opinions on something about which you are deeply ignorant? Do you also post comments on boards for other topics you don't know anything about, like radiologists or African Violet collectors? Do you realize that you are embarrassing yourselves by having vitrolic, adolescent opinions on a subject you haven't the faintest notion about?

As a nursing mother, it just really blows my mind, honestly.