Allison Cooper

Pregnancy changes more than just your body and your emotions: it changes the “stuff” that you need on a daily basis, too. I didn’t realize just how much I needed — or how the packing game had changed — until I needed to place it all neatly into my (now) overflowing suitcase.

Family travel helped me see what I'd been missing out on.

Stretch marks. Tiger stripes. Road maps. Ant trails. Tattoos. Mommy stripes.

Then all of a sudden he stopped and muttered the words, “Nevermind mom, you don’t understand. You’re not a gamer.” That stopped me in my tracks.

We do our best as parents, but there is no plan or prediction that can determine how your relationship with your children will be, grow, and change throughout the course of our lives. That is one of the most unpredictable things in parenthood.

Parenthood is so chaotic that we find ourselves spewing words sometimes that we probably never, ever pictured ourselves saying. Then parenthood happened.

I remember very vividly those first days of feeding my son solids.

I think that before I actually became a mom, I dreamt of sick days to be filled with breakfasts in bed, handwritten notes with all the words spelled wrong, and misshapen pancakes — but the reality is far from that dream. I'm flustered just thinking about it.

Body-shaming exists, but we shouldn't accept it as just another sad and simple fact of life. Model Ashley Graham is on the front lines of this fight for body positivity.

Faux freckles. Come on. You know that you have always wanted to strategically place a little freckle and mimic what Cindy Crawford has naturally.