Reasons Mommy Drinks
Page 4
INGREDIENTS
½ ounce white crème de cacao
½ ounce vodka
½ ounce Irish cream
Dash of cinnamon
INSTRUCTIONS
Combine the crème de cacao, vodka, and Irish cream in a shaker with ice. Shake well and strain into an ice-filled glass. Top with cinnamon.
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
Mommy used to kill it when it came to cardio. She could spin for an hour and still look adorable enough to flirt with Braedon, the twenty-six-year-old trainer/man candy. The gym was a social place and Mommy was on the A-list—that A stood for “ass,” and hers was tight. Now Mommy does baby yoga. This is not a workout but an excuse to drop $20 to do one Downward-Facing Dog and spend the other forty-three minutes in a Circle Bitch about sleep training. Mommy is still hypercompetitive, only now it’s over whose baby is doing what first. Mommy has actually pushed you to do things you’re not ready for, like propping you up to sitting, then feigned surprise when you promptly toppled over and bashed your head on a yoga block. The four calories burned trying to keep the snot-covered communal toys out of your mouth during class are made up for in spades by the post-Namaste trip to the Fair Trade coffee shop, where a carob-chip spelt cookie packs a whopping seventeen grams of fat. Mommy may now live in her Lulus, but she has a feeling the rear view isn’t the same.
INGREDIENTS
5 ounces Diet Coke
1 ounce vodka
Squeeze of lime
INSTRUCTIONS
Fill a glass with ice. Pour in all the ingredients and stir. Only fifty-six calories!
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
It’s not even 10 AM and you’ve been screaming in your crib for what feels like an eternity. Actually it’s been four minutes. The longest four minutes of Mommy’s life. All she wants to do is run upstairs and sweep you up into her arms, but Dr. Ferber says to let you cry for up to an hour. An hour? Mommy can’t take it. She’s tried everything from all the Guaranteed to Work books: The No-Cry Sleep Solution; Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child; The Sleepeasy Solution. All have been epic failures. The only thing that used to work was pushing you around and around the same streets in your stroller. The bonus to that was the baby weight melted off as Mommy walked for hours a day. The best Bugaboo accessory purchase to date has been the cup holder, as Mommy mapped out her route based on Starbucks locations. Now that you’re older and more alert, this trick no longer works because you’re distracted by every dog, car, or light gust of wind. Depriving you of naps is “akin to torture,” the books say, so you have to stay in your crib and cry it out, or throw up, or both. If it’s any consolation, Mommy is also crying it out. She really wishes she could numb the sinking feeling that she’s The Worst Mother in the World. Plus, it’s hard to hear The View over all the combined sobbing.
INGREDIENTS
2 ounces orange juice
2 ounces pineapple juice
2 ounces pomegranate juice
1 ounce grenadine
½ ounce almond syrup
Fresh mint leaves
Pineapple spear
INSTRUCTIONS
Chill a tall glass. Combine the orange, pineapple, and pomegranate juices, grenadine, and almond syrup in a blender with cracked ice and blend until smooth. Pour into the glass, garnish with the mint and pineapple spear, and turn up the volume.
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
Before you were born, Sparky was the center of Mommy and Daddy’s universe. Sparky was the Test Baby and was spoiled as such with free-range bison meat, monogrammed dishes, and endless affection. Sparky had a Facebook page with funny status updates like “Chasing tail tonight, look out ladies” and “It’s Thursday? Feels like Friday.” Now poor Sparky is pet-sona non grata. This has led to some bad behavior, including chewing all your baby toys and Mommy’s entire collection of Aldo shoes. Never mind the fact that Sparky completely failed as the Test Baby. It turns out Mommy and Daddy can’t just leave you for a night by turning on the National Geographic channel and putting out a bowl of kibble. Speaking of kibble, yesterday Mommy caught you eating some off the kitchen floor. You won’t eat homemade, wholesome food, but you will eat dehydrated cow testicles or whatever else is in pet chow. Not only is the entire IKEA EKTORP sofa either clawed or covered in spit-up, but it seems both you and Sparky are in a literal pissing contest to mark your territory. These days, Mommy’s always cleaning up someone else’s pee: yours, Sparky’s, and Daddy’s. Maybe when you grow up, you’ll have better aim.
INGREDIENTS
Lemon juice
Salt
1 ounce vodka
3 ounces grapefruit juice
INSTRUCTIONS
Rim a glass with lemon juice and then salt. Fill the glass with ice. Pour in the vodka and grapefruit juice, and stir. Serve on a short leash.
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
Sometimes, when she’s covered in baby barf, tortured by sleep deprivation, and as hormonal as Chastity Chaz Bono, Mommy fantasizes about What Could Have Been. This involves mentally scrolling through (and, real talk, Facebook creeping) her roster of exes. Here’s what plays out during her It’s a Wonderful Life flashback of relationships past:
The Big Man with a Small Penis: Would have made her a kept woman, complete with a mansion, four nannies plus a night nurse, and a barely legal mistress.
The Nice Guy with No Backbone: Would have done whatever she wanted all the time (including every diaper change and late-night feeding!) except go away and/or stop crying.
Questionably Gay Metrosexual Man: Would have done all the cooking, shopping, and cleaning of their adopted child, and Mommy would have become best friends with the massage feature on her showerhead.
The Hot Guy with No Career: Would have motivated Mommy to keep up her Brazilian waxes and lose the baby weight in sexercise while she went broke funding his T-shirt–printing business.
Ultimately, though, when you wrap your pudgy arms around her neck and bare your big toothy grin, Mommy is incredibly grateful for Daddy. They made you together. Then she reminds herself that exes are called exes for a reason.
INGREDIENTS
1 ounce pear nectar
1 ounce cranberry juice
Prosecco
INSTRUCTIONS
Chill a Champagne flute. Pour in the pear nectar and cranberry juice, and top with Prosecco. Spill a little on the ground in memory, and close the door (and your laptop, you stalker!) on the past.
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
Like Mommy’s mother-in-law, Mother Nature can be irritating. However, Mommy is going stir-crazy and needs to get you out of the house before you Jackson Pollock another wall. The Weather Channel is as random as her iTunes shuffle, so here’s what could play out:
Baby, it’s cold outside. Mommy has to wrestle you into multiple layers, including an embarrassing reindeer sweater and a bunting bag worthy of a trek to base camp. You won’t wear mittens and you continually throw off your hat. An old lady gives Mommy the stink eye and judges her parenting in another language.
Blame it on the rain. This means Mommy can’t walk you anywhere unless she MacGyvers a tent over the stroller. She can’t carry an umbrella while pushing your SUV, so Mommy gets soaked. Your hat falls into your eyes, rendering you temporarily blind, but Mommy can’t adjust it because of the Fortress of Waterproof Solitude surrounding you.
Feelin’ hot, hot, hot. You’re too little to wear sunscreen, so you have to wear a UV-blocking Hazmat suit, leaving you sweaty and pissed off. You refuse to wear your junior Ray-Bans and keep ripping off your ironic straw fedora. The hat goes MIA. Even though you and Mommy were almost home, she has to retrace her steps to find it. She sees your hat in the middle of the road. The hat gets run over by a Range Rover. You laugh and laugh. Mommy should be frustrated that yet another $22 has been flushed down the proverbial Diaper Genie, but instead she silently applauds your sociopolitical stance on hipsters and makes a mental note that your style is more Hugo
Boss than Unemployed Musician.
INGREDIENTS
1 ounce dark rum
2 ounces lemon juice
2 ounces passion fruit syrup
Slices of orange
Cherry
INSTRUCTIONS
Hurry and combine the dark rum, lemon juice, and passion fruit syrup in a shaker with ice. Shake well and strain into an ice-filled hurricane glass (it’s tulip shaped, but really, any glass will do). Garnish with the orange slices and cherry.
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
Mommy’s weekly TV consumption has skyrocketed since your birth, rivaling levels seen only in the early 1990s, when she was a latchkey kid. At least back then her female TV role models were Angela Bower and Clair Huxtable. Now she’s stuck with Khloé Kardashian. The first spike occurred in your early weeks, when Mommy’s maternity-leave routine consisted of parking herself in front of the (appropriately named) boob tube every two hours while you suckled on her breast for marathon feeding sessions. After a decade of resorting to Soapcentral.com for updates, finally she could watch the drama unfold in real time, a perk that helped her cope with the tragic loss of her income and abs that accompanied your birth. Unfortunately, this period was short-lived, as Mommy’s daytime routine soon evolved to that of an Ironman athlete between cross-city treks to Gymboree and wrestling competitions with high chairs and strollers. Mommy’s days have become so physically taxing that by the time your bedtime rolls around, collapsing in front of the TV is the only activity that doesn’t leave her breathless. Sometimes Mommy wishes it was still PC to park you in front of Sesame Street, so she could (learn to) cook a meal or read something other than the What to Expect series, safe in the knowledge that Big Bird’s alphabet song was permeating your subconscious mind. But the interweb is abuzz with warnings that TV before the age of two will supposedly saddle you with attention-deficit disorder for life. Even though she knows that next year a new study will be released showing Einstein-like brain patterns in kids exposed to Dora the Explorer from birth, in yet another victory for Mommy Guilt, the remote control has been relegated to a teething device in your presence.
INGREDIENTS
1 ounce peach schnapps
1 ounce Irish cream
1 dash grenadine
INSTRUCTIONS
Pour the schnapps into a highball glass. Add the Irish cream to the center and top with grenadine. Serve with a TV dinner.
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
Pre-baby Facebook was fun. Post-baby Facebook is hell. The status updates from the non-baby crew are: Exotic travel! References to music! Checked in at hipster pizzeria slash tequila bar! Mommy longs for the days where she was part of that elite crew who put their night back together through tagged photos and Foursquare. And what the hell is a meme? Mommy can’t keep up.
The status updates from the baby crew are: My baby! Don’t you love my profile pic that’s of my baby? Check out another upload of my baby! Below the photo there are comments from other parents about how cute the baby is, followed by many exclamation points. Mommy only wishes she could post what everyone’s really thinking: That kid ain’t right. Hey look, Mommy has a friend request! Sadly, it’s Insert Baby Name Here’s Mom from playgroup. (Ignore.) After commenting on a link to the latest OK Go video in an effort to project an image that she’s still cool, Mommy was tagged covered in regurgitated rice cereal at Salsa Babies Dance Class. Mommy’s status update: Feeling as relevant as Myspace. (Wait, three friends “like” this?)
INGREDIENTS
5 ounces sparkling wine
1 ounce raspberry vodka
Splash of Chambord
Fresh raspberries
INSTRUCTIONS
Pour the wine, vodka, and Chambord into a Champagne flute and stir. Garnish with raspberries and enjoy the instant friends you make when you serve it.
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
According to her old Match.com profile, Mommy has always cared about the environment. Though she recycles her Diet Coke cans and avoids eating things like baby panda frittata, she may have slightly exaggerated when she said her perfect date night was “hand washing the poor baby penguins from the Dawn commercials.” The thing is, buying a car that runs on sunshine and hugs just wasn’t high on her list of priorities. Since you’ve been born, however, she is struck by just how shitty we’ve been treating our planet. It’s a real buzzkill to actually watch the YouTube video of Gordon Ramsay’s shark fin soup exposé or discover via Twitter that the ozone is so screwed that soon we’re all going to look like the cast of Jersey Shore. If the North Pole melts and all of Santa’s reindeer drown in a flash flood, she’s pretty sure that will ruin your childhood. When Mommy really thinks about it, she worries not only about the future of our planet but about the growing threat of violence, poverty, and disease, and how she’ll ever protect you from all of it. (Whoa, that shit got real.) No longer can Mommy turn a blind eye to Mother Earth: Special Victims Unit. However, Mommy draws the eco-line at cloth diapers. After the Exxon disaster that came out of you this morning, she’s going to have to stick with disposable.
NOTE
Feel great about your headache the next day. The more throbbing it is, the more you did your part for the environment.
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
Mommy was punch drunk from labor when she signed you up for Infant Swim at the local public pool. She had visions of you floating peacefully in the water, an extension of the womb, but failed to consider this would mean pouring herself into postpartum swimwear. Visual reference: sausage bursting on a BBQ. All Mommy owns are neon string bikinis from a previous life, but she can’t bear to buy a sensible one piece from the I’ve Given Up line at Sears. As a small (large) bonus, her boobs have swollen to the size of Jessica Simpson’s and have never looked trashier, in a good way. She’s hoping this distracts from the train wreck happening south of the doubleD border, cruelly highlighted by a now-permanent linea nigra. The class is only twenty minutes long, but it takes almost an hour to wriggle you into swim diapers and get herself dressed while balancing you on a germ-infested bench. One round of the “Fishy Wishy” song and your lips have turned blue, so Mommy wraps you in a towel and lets her dream that you’ll become the next Missy “the Missile” Franklin float away with the pool noodle. As she dries you off while plodding back down the pool deck, Mommy can already feel the plantar wart growing on her foot. At no point during this experience did you look like the baby on the cover of the Nirvana album. Oh well, whatever, nevermind.
INGREDIENTS
1 ounce blue curaçao
3 ounces lemonade
Splash of lemon-lime soda
INSTRUCTIONS
Fill a glass with ice. Pour in the curaçao, lemonade, and lemon-lime soda and stir.
NOTE
Smells like teen spirits.
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
When Mommy learned that babies fly free until they’re two (at which point they’re charged the full fare!), she decided it was time to rack up some serious air miles, even if that meant the occasional solo mission without her wingman, Daddy. Cut to your very first flight. When Mommy was single, she remembers seeing a parent with child in tow and praying that person wouldn’t sit next to her. Now she is that person. Mommy has changed two dirty diapers, flashed half of economy class, and endured five judgmental stares, and the captain hasn’t even turned on the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign yet. Meanwhile, Mommy might as well have bought you a full-price fare with all the extra charges she’s incurred for carting the following across the country: your Pack ’n Play, car seat, stroller, wardrobe, and the hundred diapers you’ll blow through by Thursday. It takes an excruciating hour of pacing up and down the aisle, but Mommy finally manages to rock you to sleep. Only for you to wake up twenty minutes later, at which point she’s barely made it past the opening credits of the in-flight movie. Unfortunately, the only thing entertaining you at the moment is licking the fold-down tray and ingesting pieces of the tattered Sky-M
all magazine. The way this trip is going, she will barely be able to summon up the courage to board the return flight home, let alone take advantage of JetBlue’s seat sale for trip number two. Looks like Mommy can tuck her passport away in the place she keeps sleep, downtime, and white clothing, only to be unpacked once you’re old enough for overnight camp.
INGREDIENTS
1 ounce gin
¼ ounce maraschino liqueur
¼ ounce apricot brandy
Splash of lemon juice
INSTRUCTIONS
Combine all the ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake well and strain into a glass.
NOTE
Airsick bag optional.
HOW BADLY YOU NEED THIS DRINK
Mommy and Daddy used to look for property based on number of exposed beams and proximity to independent espresso bars. Now it’s based solely on school district and parks per square mile. They had to sell their fantastic downtown sub-penthouse loft with concrete floors and angles and have traded it in for a tiny, leaky money pit with a yard covered in weeds in a family-friendly neighborhood. Mommy loved making no effort whatsoever to know her neighbors and avoiding eye contact in the elevator. Now she has to memorize everyone’s name (which involves Post-its lining the inside of her kitchen cabinetry) and force a smile the minute she turns down her tree-lined street. As a general rule, Mommy hates all of humanity—especially when she is this sleep deprived—so this is a daily challenge. No longer can she stumble out of her building and find herself in a trendy restaurant or designer boutique. Now she finds herself wrestling you in and out of the Peg Perego to schlep you to Home Depot. As a small bonus, watching Daddy swear at the lawn mower is kind of Ward Cleaver sexy.