I often receive information about how to raise a happy baby, how to be a better parent, how to find that coveted “me time” I keep hearing about. I’m not sure why I get these direct emails. I don’t remember signing up for any of them. Perhaps when you give birth your name is added to some sort of database?

That, or someone saw a train wreck in the making and decided to anonymously add my email address to several spammers to teach me how to parent and keep things in check.

I received one of these easy-to-follow daily schedules, an hourly guide to get through the day with your baby and it caught my interest.

Suggested Hourly Activity

7:00am—Tummy Time 

9:00am—Stay close, carry baby around in an infant carrier showing them the sights and sounds in her environment        

10:00am—take a walk   

12:00pm—high chair time. Have the baby look at a book while you prepare lunch, engage in conversation with the child

1:00pm—set your baby in an activity centre for no more than 30 minutes to encourage leg movement and curious play

2:00pm—nap time

4:00pm—solo play. Place your baby in a play yard to amuse themselves

5:00pm–dinner

Reality

7:00am—Sneak around the house hoping the baby doesn’t wake up just yet

9:00am—remove the shot glasses from the baby’s hands she found in the liquor cabinet and load her into the car to buy milk for the third time this week

10:00am—take a walk down the hall and find the raccoon baby behind older sibling’s door eating the mosaic stickers off the homemade poster

11:00am—look at your watch and then look at it again. How can it only be 11:00am? We’ve read Violet’s House forty-eight times, baked some muffins, burnt some muffins, thrown out some muffins, eaten some muffin paper? It has to be at least 3pm.

12:00pm—lunch time: avocado, lean turkey breast, Polly Pocket shoe, cantaloupe, pita

1:00pm—fold the laundry while the baby stomps on the neatly stacked piles and dives into the basket. Use the basket as a boat and/or train to push up and down the hall while the baby tosses the clean clothes into the “water”

Once you’ve kicked yourself for even attempting to fold the laundry while the baby is awake, now you can try that infant carrier suggestion, giving you the opportunity to scarf down a sandwich. Try to refrain from using sauces that might drip onto the back of your baby’s neck. This will be far too tempting to lick off when you are back at the grocery store later because you forgot the milk and nobody needs to see that.

2:00pm—negotiate, beg, plead with the baby to rest or at the very least, enjoy some quiet time while you search the house for the diaper you thought you threw in the garage garbage bin but that lingering, rank odour suggests you instead set it down while en route to the garage and it’s somewhere hiding in the house.

2:30pm—wake the baby who has been asleep for no longer than three minutes and pick up older siblings at school

4:00pm—call Poison Control (speed dial 4) to see if it’s okay that the baby drank a bottle of purple food dye and ate a foil-wrapped, chocolate egg, foil included, in the same week

5:00pm—dinner: hummus (to be smeared on face and in hair only, not for baby consumption but a good boost to trick the parent into thinking you’re feeding her all the right things), mango, eraser from big sister’s favourite pencil, rice.

6:00pm—bath, stories, cavity search to find small, missing toys but more importantly to remove anything that might disrupt an otherwise restful night’s sleep.

7:00pm—bed

8:00pm-Haagen Dazs ice cream bar, Modern Family, have husband carry you to bed and try not to drool on the hardwood floors on the way there.