I have about a dozen friends who are currently pregnant with their first babies. That’s a lot of new babies, and a lot of people who are about to enter the hallowed role of “Parent”. There are many things that run through your mind when you’re about to become a mom or a dad: What are babies like? How do I know what the baby wants? What do I do with a baby?

Well I’m glad you were wondering, soon-to-be-parents, because I have all the answers (get used to that one, because soon enough you’ll realize that everyone else seems to think they have all the answers for how to raise your child). So, in no particular order, here are a few things you can do ahead of time to prepare yourself for parenthood.

Preparation For Labor And Delivery:

1. Run a marathon. Backwards. Or on your hands, for all I care. Do this while getting jabbed in the gut by a UFC cage fighter every 2-5 minutes. Repeat for 12-48 hours.
   
2. Don’t let your husband sleep for 2 or 3 days. Then, at the peak of rush hour, insist that he drive you across town in 1/4 the time that it usually takes during no-traffic. Turn up the heat in the car to 90 degrees. Yell at him the whole time he’s driving, and continuously insist that he drive faster.
3. Forget holding an ice cube in your hand–go to Alaska and jump into the frozen ocean. Stay in the water until you don’t think you’re going to die, and then stay in the water because you know that it’s what is best for your unborn child.
4. Have a sumo wrestler sit on your stomach while someone reminds you to breathe calmly.
5. Take off your clothes–all of them–and invite your closest family and friends over to witness you walk naked through the house while shouting obscenities.
6. Pee or throw-up on the floor and expect your husband to clean it up with a smile on his face while he says, “You’re doing GREAT, Honey! Keep it up!”.
7. Pull down your pants and sit in a pile of poison ivy or stinging nettles. Have fun trying to pee for the next couple of weeks.
8. Roll around on shards of broken glass while practicing your hypno-birthing mantras.

Preparation For A Newborn:

9. Set your alarm clock to go off every 2 hours around the clock. Every time the alarm goes off, get out of bed and repeatedly pinch the most tender part of your body for 30 minutes.
10. Put a cat in a paper bag. Blindfold yourself. Gently and swiftly wrap the “happy” cat in a tight swaddle.
11. Find some moldy food in the back of your fridge and smear it on your shirt. Don’t change, because you know that a clean shirt will just get dirty again.
12. Turn on your kitchen faucet to a low stream. Wrap the faucet in a towel. When that towel gets soaked in a few minutes, take it off and wrap on a new towel. Continue doing this, night and day, until you run out of towels. Then wash the towels and keep doing it.
13. Hold a 10 pound sack of flour while you do everything: get dressed, go to the bathroom, cook dinner,  eat.
14. Squirt mustard on all of your favorite clothes, your carpet, and your furniture. Have fun trying to get the stains out.
15. Search iTunes for an annoying sound: nails on a chalkboard, screeching animals, or grinding metal would all work. Have your husband play the sounds any time you start to doze off to sleep.
16. Read “Goodnight Moon”. 5,468 times.
17. Forget to eat breakfast, be too busy to eat lunch, and be too tired to eat dinner.
18. Take all of your showers at 5 AM or midnight because they’re the only times that you’re free.
19. Buy an entire wardrobe of adorable clothes that are 3 sizes too small. Get frustrated that you can’t wear any of them.

Preparation For A Toddler:

20. Take all of your favorite possessions and either lock them away or break them.
21. Take a pick-up truck to Goodwill and buy out their toy section. Back the truck up to your front door and dump the toys into your living room. Don’t ever pick them up.
22. Make a big batch of spaghetti. Throw all of it onto your walls, ceiling, floors, and furniture.
23. Gather all of the items you think you would need if the world was ending and you needed to get out of town. It will be a lot of stuff. Load those items into your car every time you leave the house, and unload them every time you get back home.
24. Cover every outlet in your house with duct tape. Get annoyed every time you try to plug something in.
25. Make an important phone call with a boombox playing heavy metal music at max volume in the background.
26. Do a load of laundry. Take your clean laundry directly outside and dump it into a mud puddle. Wash it all again. Repeat 7 days a week.
27. Go to the grocery store with a pair of fighting dogs. Tie them up inside your shopping cart  and calmly complete your shopping trip while ignoring the evil stares of the other shoppers.
28. Go to Costco and buy a box of Goldfish crackers, a box of Cheerios, and a bag of raisins. Dump them all out in your car, smash them into the seats, and stomp them into the carpet.
29. Wake up at 6 AM every. Single. Day.
30. Spend time away from your home exactly 1 evening per month. Return home by 9 PM because you know that you’ll have to wake up at 6 AM tomorrow.
31. Put honey on your hands and smear them over all of your windows.
32. Withdraw $400 from your bank account each month. Burn it.
33. Start drinking massive quantities of coffee each day to kick-start your caffeine-dependency.
34. Repeat the following words to yourself until they don’t phase you anymore: poop, pee, booger, snot, puke. Take it one step further by posting about these topics on Facebook.

OK, so it’s not exactly 138 steps–but it sure feels like it. Hey, nobody ever said that parenting was easy!