You read the books, listened to your friends' advice and even spent time around other people's kids – but nothing could truly prepare you for what it's really like to have children of your own.

A sudden complete lack of free time and privacy, the weird and hilarious questions you have to field, the bodily fluids you regularly encounter: yep, becoming a mum or dad is an adventure with new twists every day. Now parents online are sharing the things they wished they'd known before they procreated. From having to sing the same song eight times in a row before bedtime to your baby rolling over at a crucial moment during a nappy change, the parents of the internet are revealing the weird and (sometimes) wonderful things that they never thought they'd have to deal with. Here are some of our favourites, courtesy of Reddit's parenting forum:

"Answering questions you thought you knew the answer to. What's fire? Why do we have sky? Why are bricks harder than sticks? I didnt realize how little I actually know about things until I had a kid old enough to ask me."

"The random rules you invent on an almost daily basis. We don't put rocks in our mouths. We don't eat the cat food."

"How messy and cluttered a home gets after children. And no matter how much you clean and organize, within a week the house goes back to looking like a hurricane passed by it." "You will be tired. Always." "When you’ve just spent ten minutes strapping them in their car seat, after wrangling them out the door. They say 'mommy I’ve got go pee pee now'"

"That I would someday have to try and dig a stuck poop out of my daughter’s butt and not even hesitate about it. You do a lot of gross stuff without blinking as a parent."

"Getting home doesn't mean you finally get to rest." "How you can spend a whole day begging for it to be time to put the kids to bed.... and then 3 minutes after they are asleep you want to sneak in for a snuggle because you miss them." "The days are long but the years are short."

What are the things you never knew about being a parent that you know now? Let us know in the Facebook comments or on Twitter!