Copaken Deborah and Polumbo Randy - The abcs of parenthood: an alphabet of parenting advice

Can we get a dog? Please, can we get a dog? Consider forgoing the years of pleading and get one now. Yes, your sneakers might get chewed, but whats a little gnawed sole next to your childs awed soul?

Caring for a dog teaches joyful and invaluable life lessons, as well as offering affectionate touch, warmth, and unconditional love. The work of training a pet allows a child to experience boundary-setting from a parents perspective. Feeding rituals, bath time, and poo-mucking, done with intention and love, become a chance for bonding and learning responsibility. The sorrow of burying a pet teaches small hearts how precious and fleeting life is.

Not ready for a dog? Practice on a cat. Try to keep a houseplant alive. If you succeed, visit a shelter. Yes, youll be the one walking Fido, but theres a beautiful rhythm and punctuation to a day that starts and ends with a dog walk. Think of the morning walk as the capital letter at the beginning of this sentence, the nighttime one as the period at the end.

Bringing a baby into your home for the first time can feel like a seismological shift in the tectonic plates of your life. The ground shifts. The earth moves. Your once pristine home will be littered with the aftermath of this domestic natural disaster: diapers and onesies and laundry and dishes and unopened bills and tiny socks and breast pumps and miniature sweaters and a car seat and a bouncy seat and several other seats you have no idea what theyre for, but someone said you had to have them, so you have them, and strollers and a nursing pillow and toys and stuffed animals, and just when you feel the earth stand still for one second, seriously, one little second, the aftershocks set in. The explosion of cereal! The crash of blocks and plastic bricks! Good grief, youll be tempted to think on a particularly high Richter-scale day, how did a human the size of a small ham unleash this?

They did. They do. Its all part of the master plan. And guess what? Eighteen years later, itll be so tidy and quiet that youll be able to hear a baby sock drop, that stray one youll find under the couch the day after your child leaves for college. And when you grip it in your palm, this tiny talisman of whats been lost, youll realize that youd give anything for just one more day at the epicenter.