The, Rules of Life, 4th Edition

RULE 79

Keep schtum

I have a friend who has three small children. She told me recently that before she had children she didn’t really get the things that people with children told her. She wasn’t always convinced by their claims of tiredness or logistical problems, she didn’t necessarily believe that children could squabble that much or be such hard work, she sometimes just didn’t understand what they were talking about. Even when she had two children, she didn’t really get what people with more than two children were telling her. Now, however, she says she finally really gets it, and it just isn’t like she’d imagined.

You’d have thought that if you had two children you’d know what life was like for people with three kids. But you don’t. In ...