Before you become the parent of your first baby, you walk around with stars in your eyes and with big hopes and dreams. You envision a future which includes Ivy League universities, jobs in research which result in discovering the cure for cancer and future daughters-in-law that secretly confide in you that they are marrying up and that you are way more fun to be with than their own mother. I can promise you that the thought never crosses your mind that you will one day be forced to leave Chick-Fil-A because your son didn't just hit the kid back that hit him on the playground. He bit him. In the jugular.

You move to a different phase of parenting then. You think you will never be able to go out into public again. Luckily your child will get a few months older and will find himself with more words to communicate how he is feeling. Suddenly he says "I'm angry" instead of trying to bite the head off of some random mean kid or even worse, some kid who just happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. You breathe a sigh of relief until the preschool teacher of Child #2 pulls you aside to tell you that you have yet another piranha on your hands. She tells you that they are all biting each other all day long at this age but somehow you really just don't feel better. He too grows out of it when he is better able to communicate and you breathe a sigh of relief.

Then you give birth to your third and you hope that your baby is two before he gets his first tooth. He doesn't, of course. He gets his first tooth when he is seven months old. There is no fanfare for Baby #3's first tooth. In fact, you pretend it's not happening.

Kristen:  It's a tooth.

Derek:  I don't think so.

Kristen:  Feel it. It's a tooth.

Derek: Maybe. Yeah, it is. Congratulations, Buddy. (sigh)

Kristen:  Our life is over.

Derek:  Maybe he won't be like his brothers.

Parents can dream.

Kristen Hammond is a freelance writer and purveyor of her own sassy tee collection at Baby Brewing. She can also be found playing a marginally PG version of herself at PBS Supersisters, a parenting blog she writes with her two goody-two-shoes sisters in real life, or cheating on her personal blog Mommy Needs a Cocktail with Twitter as Mommy4Cocktails.