My kids range in age from four to eighteen. One we adopted at age twelve, and one at age almost-two, so we didn’t have all of them as babies.

Still, we’ve had one or two preschoolers in our home for about fifteen of the past eighteen years. That’s a long time to live with carseats.

We’re not having any more. My baby-craving hormones have faded, and I'm looking forward to that golden moment one year and two months from now when the youngest will start kindergarten. I’ll be able to take the trash outside without anyone following me and eat food all by myself without anyone wanting a bite. Someday I may live in a house without scribbles on the walls.

Anyway. After all this time, you’d think I’d be a gold mine of child-rearing advice, a fountain of kid knowledge. I don’t think so. For one thing, just having six kids doesn’t automatically make you an expert. Quantity and quality don't necessarily correlate. I can point to lots and lots of things that I have done wrong and still do wrong.

Still, you’d think that after all this time I must have learned SOMETHING I could pass on, some bits of wisdom that a person would just have to accumulate after all those years with kids, something that isn’t regularly repeated in every child care magazine out there. Hmm, let me see . . .

I can think of four things.

First: When your youngest kid outgrows the potty seat, don’t get rid of it. At some point in your child’s elementary school career, a doctor will undoubtedly want a urine specimen from him/her. The potty seat is the easiest way to get it. Much better than trying to hold a bottle or a Tupperware container in the right—well, we’ll move on. (Uh, we mostly have girls . . . )

Second: This applies if your child ever gets the infamous Tree Assignment in school. You know, that one where they have to collect leaves from different trees, and then they make a poster where they glue the leaves on and label them? The easiest way to collect and identify the leaves is to wander around a nursery where they sell labeled trees. Works great. These assignments are usually made in the fall when the trees are losing their leaves anyway, so you aren’t hurting the trees any.

Third: When two kids are fighting and one of them physically hurts the other one and you can’t remember how long all those books say a kid that age is supposed to be in time-out, a useful phrase to have is, “YOU are in time-out until HE stops crying."

Fourth: There is one rule which applies to anything your children do that drives you crazy, a solution to any problem, one that works 95% of the time: Wait five years. They’ll grow out of it.