I was a bit sparse with the words, but it still gives the jist of how my little bitty pea brain works.

The book was actually on the cover page for a whole week!

MomCentral.com is also running a contest to give-away five copies of the book. Click here to enter a chance to win.

"My administrative assistant assured me that I would understand it all better once I became a mom; she found many of the essays hysterical as a mom of three girls under five.

The Manual for Motherhood could be a cute gift book for a pregnant friend or an easy read for those moms who want someone else out there to relate to their situation." Read the full review...

Check out the fabu picture by photographer Faye Chapman.

[Review Text]
 
As parents we all have stories—pregnancy stories, birth stories, sleep stories (or lack of sleep stories), horrendous virus stories, biting stories, poop stories. Writer and blogger Christine Fugate, Laguna Beach mother of two, decided to collect these stories and publish them in an anthology. She posted the question, “What do you know now that you wish you knew before becoming a parent?” on her blog www.motheringheights.net and received over one hundred submissions. They came from mothers, fathers, and grandmothers from 26 states and 4 countries. The winning contributions (thirty essays and three poems) will be published this month by West-Coast Bias Press in the anthology The Mothering Heights Manual For Motherhood. An additional thirty-two entries will be posted on-line on Fugate’s blog. Many contributors are established writers, like Orange County’s Sugar Momma, Cynthia Jenkins. But many are just regular parents like you and me.

The compiled stories tell the good, the bad, and the ugly from the frontlines of parenting. There are many comic (and tragi-comic) episodes: the meatloaf that tastes like fertilizer, the little litigator questioning every aspect of a new reward system, the parakeet being bathed in the toilet, the realization that the three best words in the English language aren’t “I love you” but, “School holidays end.” What Fugate aims for in this collection is a certain honesty, the idea that while we all love our children there is a lot about being a parent that is not all that fun or loving. “The real mommy war is not between moms, but inside ourselves,” writes Fugate in her introduction. “We need to stop fighting the ideals and be more accepting of our messes, mistakes and mommy blues.” Both the book and the companion on-line anthology are full of messes and mistakes that will leave you feeling a little bit better about your own experiences as a parent. None of us is perfect. We are all doing the best we can.