The day your first child is born, there are about a million ways in which life as you know it will never be the same.  Here are a few truths about motherhood that I never really thought about before I became a mom.

1)     We hear our babies crying all. the. time. Neighbor’s dog barking? Distant ambulance siren? Goose honking while it flies by? Somehow they all – at least momentarily – sound like our baby’s cry.

2)      We learn just how much it’s possible to accomplish with only one arm.  Who knew I could make Nutella cupcakes with buttercream frosting while holding my infant son the entire time?

3)      Things come out of our mouths that we never would have expected.  “Sweetie, don’t chew of Papa’s flip flop.” “No honey, that’s not Mama, that’s Michelle Obama.”

4)      Our kisses take on the magical power to make pain disappear.

5)      Even if we absolutely swore we’d never do baby-talk, we end up adopting the same words for things that our kids use (“Do you want more wo-wo or do you want a baba to eat?”)

6)      Our brains become capable of tracking and calculating an endless number of things simultaneously, and this knowledge is possessed by us alone: number of clean onesies left before we have to do laundry; amount of time since baby’s last meal/nap/poop/diaper change; everything the baby has eaten for the day; exactly how each piece of clothing fits (“Why did you put those pants on him?  They’re way too short and only to be used in case of emergency.”)

7)      We develop insane interpretive skills.  Baby: “Eh.” Me: “Oh, you want me to give you the spoon so you can feed yourself?”

8)      We instantly supplant Weird Al as the best writer of song parodies (“I like breast milk and I cannot lie, you other babies can’t deny…”)

9)      If something silly or random makes our baby laugh, we’ll repeat it a million times.

10)   When the baby is napping, we develop superhuman efficiency, accomplishing more in one hour than we did for a week during our pre-baby days.

Sound off!  What changed when you became a mom that you weren’t expecting?