1. You stepped on a Lego and bit your tongue till blood ran rather than dropping a string of f-bombs in front of your kids.
2. You don’t consider buying a minivan to be lame or selling out.
3. You always lock the bathroom door because you just want five minutes of private alone time. Seriously, is that too much to ask?
4. You have chosen sleep over sex.
5. You can talk with technical proficiency about the pros and cons between the UPPAbaby Vista and the Baby Jogger City Mini GT strollers.
6. You have eaten applesauce, raisins and string cheese for dinner.
7. You have used a diaper to buff your car.
8. You have ever Googled the terms “endometrium” or “colostrum.”
9. You can identify all the characters on Paw Patrol.
10. You find more Goldfish crackers than change when you pull up your couch cushions.
11. You shamelessly wear a “World’s Best Poppa” T-shirt in public.
12. You have spent a Saturday night kid-proofing your home and considered it a date night because your wife was in the same room for most of the time.
13. You have used a diaper bag as a bourbon carrier.
14. Your Netflix suggestions are all animated features.
15. You’re on a first-name basis with the employees who work the overnight shift at the 24-hour drugstore in your neighborhood.
16. You buy Tide stain remover pens in bulk.
17. You feel no shame about you pick up your kids from school unshowered and still wearing the dirty clothes you were wearing when you dropped them off in the morning.
18. You have gone to a job interview with pureed peas on your tie.
19. You have changed a diaper at a concert but never stopped singing along.
20. Most of the photos on your phone are of your children.
21. You have ever been late to work because you dropped your kids off at school without their lunch and had to go all the way back home to get it before you could get on with your day.
22. You have a nanny, a babysitter, and a pediatrician on your phone’s “favorites” list.
23. You don’t consider six espressos before noon to be an aggressive amount of caffeine.
24. You yell at drivers speeding through your neighborhood that they should slow down and watch out for the little ones who live there.
25. You have done the different voices of every single character in a bedtime story.
26. Your office walls are decorated with kid artwork.
27. You have can’t make it through a graduation ceremony without crying.
28. You have a Spotify playlist of the theme songs to the movies and television shows your child loves.
29. You got freaked out watching Taken, but then calmed down by reassuring yourself that if that ever happened to your child, you could totally go all Liam Neeson on the bad guys.
30. You’ve called your father to apologize for some bad childhood behavior–because your kid is now subjecting you to the exact same thing–and he laughs at you for a solid five minutes straight.
Nevin Martell is a parenting, food, and travel writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Saveur, Men’s Journal, Fortune, Travel + Leisure, Runner’s World, and many other publications. He is author of eight books, including It’s So Good: 100 Real Food Recipes for Kids, Red Truck Bakery Cookbook: Gold-Standard Recipes from America’s Favorite Rural Bakery, and the small-press smash Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip. When he isn’t working, he loves spending time with his wife and their six-year-old son, who already runs faster than he does.
