Parenting Advice contest

I'm entering this contest to win a $250 shopping spree of Speesees organic cotton clothes at Nature's Child, a really really cute online boutique... and they're asking that you share your favorite parenting advice and post a link to the contest on your blog or discussion forum-- click here to go to the contest link.

For my first entry, I wrote this:

My favorite piece of advice came from my mother, shortly after our daughter was born. She said, "This is the only time of your life when they let you just hold them and love on them." That advice really helped carry me through those 3 a.m. feedings in the very early weeks when she wouldn't (or didn't) fall right back asleep. I would just sit in the rocking chair and hold her and really try to savor that moment, despite how tired I was.

The second piece of parenting advice that I like best is something that my friend M, whose daughter H is exactly the same age as R, told me. Basically, when we would have our regular chat sessions about all things baby-related, we would often discuss what the two girls were doing-- oh, R is doing this; H is doing that; how do you handle X? Is R or H doing Y? And we would share strategies, ideas, suggestions. It was amazing. But the best piece of advice she passed on to me, something she got from a fellow mom whose daughter is about 7 months older than H and R, was simply this:

Almost everything a little baby does is a stage. When you talk to other moms who seem like they've got it all figured out, it's really just because their baby is near the end of a particular stage. Pretty soon, something else will happen and they'll be figuring things out all over again. So when someone says, "oh, my baby sleeps all through the night," in two weeks, that baby may start teething, or standing up in the crib, or something else. Similarly, when you're going through a rough patch, you will get things figured out, and things will change.