The best parenting advice you can ever give. Ever.

I attended a lovey baby shower last week. After being seated, each guest was asked to write one piece of advice for the new mom-to-be. I assumed these notes would be assembled into a cute little memory book, to be enjoyed later by the new parents.

Woops.

Instead, a “piece of advice” was pulled every 15 minutes, read aloud, and then the person responsible for the advice received a prize (from a tree decorated with gift certificates). Towards the end of the shower, I thought I was home free. After countless and sweet “enjoy every minute,” and “assemble x, y, z into scrapbooks,” guess whose advice was chosen dead last to wrap up the whole shower? Yup, mine.

“Dear Maureen, my advice to you is to listen to everyone’s advice and to tell them that it is wonderful and that you will follow it exactly…then promptly ignore it and do whatever the hell you want.”

Thankfully, it went over surprisingly well with all of the other advice-givers.

"Even if he don't, he's gotta have his dip-tet. He's gotta have his dip-tet, honey!"