Drinking advice for new parents

We have a visitor staying with us right now. A kindly visitor who also has a nine-month lil guy of her own. No worries, we've already taken the requisite cousins of different genders sitting naked in the bathtub. The sort of thing that is incredibly embarrassing for the children and yet the parents trot it out at every occasion because they can't get over how cute their little offspring once were, the ungrateful curs.

Anyhow after completing an Olympic round of trying to put lil s to bed. I'm glad that our kindly visitor shared my feeling that it takes roughly fifteen to twenty minutes of being screamed at by an infant to begin to start having insane thoughts. And, let it be said, yes, it is sad that those five good hours you just spent with your little ball of joy don't measure up. If someone asked you how your day went your response would rightly be, "Oh, it was tough," as though the five hours of mostly playing and giggling didn't even exist. The same sort of thing rings true for most of life and is either maladaptive or evolutionarily useful for an undisclosed reason.

We sat down to a nice dinner prepared by S and decided to have a couple of glasses of wine. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes two glasses of damn near full glasses of wine were spilled across our place mats, table, floor and computers. I only regret that it didn't reach the play mat because then Sadie would have gotten a fun surprise when she set about shoving it in her mouth as she does with almost everything now.

Side note. I want to remind parents to drink copious amounts of water. Remember that study they did a few years back that said we should drink like seven gallons of water a day. Well, it was wrong, but you still should load up on water. Why? Because parents generally start the day extremely tired from a night of waking up on and off and thus have a cup or two of coffee. Then, by the end of the day, when the child has finally drifted off into peaceful sleep, the ingrate, you can't wait to have some wine. Anyhow, just remind parents to drink water because I'm pretty sure we've got a whole bunch of dehydrated people wandering around the city pushing strollers like zombies.

The point is just this for all parents. I'll probably include this in my parenting book. All parents should be drinking hard alcohol. Why? Because it's not going to stain anything, and it gets the job of taking some of the edge off the day faster than wine anyway. So put away that ten dollar bottle of wine you got at Whole Foods and pour yourself a nice glass of gin. Sure it tastes like pine trees, but don't we use them as air fresheners in cars? We must love the scent of pine.

Or sit back in the old television watching chair and have a nice glass of vodka. This will also help you understand famous Russian writers with long last names. I really don't see a downside to this plan. The only down side is new parents continuing to drink red wine until they've stained every part of their house. So, a call to alcohol, the clear kind, the good kind.