Wine vs. Whine

Wine is great 

Wine is good

Drink plenty

Everyone should 

Whining is bad

Whining's not good

Please make them stop

I would if I could

You know how people like to say you should take something with 'a grain of salt'? Children need to be taken with 'a bottle of wine'. I firmly believe in the benefits of alcohol in the raising of children. I do NOT mean to give the children alcohol, although I have thought about it on more than one occasion myself. Alcohol creates different effects on different people. If it makes you mean and ugly, ignore all of this and keep it to the bar. If you're like me it mellows you out. This is a good thing in the raising of children since their sole purpose in life seems to be to push my every button. If this fails them, they've successfully been beaten. If you're a parent you know how important that ability is. My children can tell when I am drinking. Instead of saying things like, "I hate you and never want to see you again," they've been heard saying, "Mom, you're being fun today!"

Whining can be combatted with nothing but alcohol. I know this for a fact. I am a professional mom. I have taken many a parenting class. They all tell you how to successfully gain control of a situation. This is best done, they say, through timely punishments well suited to the 'crime'. Time-outs are thought highly of. None of these people have ever tried to get MY son into a successful time-out position. Unless you're a pro wrestler, it ain't happening. Sending them to the solitude of their room is another tactic. My son only attempts to break the door down which he's artfully locked on HIS side. After that fails he turns into a toy tornado successfully trashing his room which you know I won't be able to get him to clean. Removal of privileges is another suggestion. I take the Nintendo DS away only to have to deal with the child in the car or a restaurant without this amazing pacifier of sorts. If I take away TV I am removing many a half-hour of personal sanity in which they're quietly tuned in. When my daughter was younger and occasionally at fault I had to take her books away. Yup, the only thing that would upset her was being unable to read. How sick is taking books away? May I recommend the only proven solution: wine. It's a known fact that parental stresses and attitudes effect the children. If you've been transformed into a jolly old elf they will be, too. Laughter is a powerful tool, too. Wine is usually necessary to provoke laughter in the most bleak of situations. So why is that Super Nanny freak on TV so successful? She's a wino. She keeps a flask on her at all times. This rubs off on the children. Are your children so incorrigible that you have thought about intervention? Save all that money and buy a cheap bottle of wine.

Everything Blue

My face is red

The carpet is now blue

You'd better run fast

'Cause I might kill you

My daughter has a mouthwash fascination. Yes, the girl who won't brush her teeth. (?!) I never let her have any because I thought my son would swallow it or drink it or worse. This is the kid that hid in his room with a bottle of chewable vitamins when he was quite small and had a picnic with his stuffed moose. Well, didn't she come home from a friend's house with a sample of mouthwash from a hotel. This was like a new toy to her. I watched in awe as she brushed her teeth so she could swish the minty fluid about. 

I'm over protective to put it simply. I decided it was time to give in to the mouthwash woes. I got Listerine's Agent Cool Blue. It's designed especially for kids my son's age. Used before brushing it turns plaque dark blue. The mouthwash itself is very dark in color. The kids then brush until the teeth turn white, or at least that's the idea. They'd seen it on TV and about freaked when they saw I bought it. They clamored to brush right away, in the middle of the afternoon. Hmm, maybe this wouldn't be such a bad thing after all.

It turned their teeth blue. It turned the sink blue. It turned the yellow carpet blue... I was immediately disgusted that something so darn BLUE would be meant for kids. They obviously had a hard time keeping it in their mouths. 

That was the first day. The second day my son decided, for some reason unknown to me, to carry a cup of Cool Blue into his room without my knowledge. Of course, it got spilled. It looked like something CSI should be called in for. The blue stains and blue spatter were everywhere in his room, mainly concentrated on the light tan carpet.

If you don't know me very well, you might not know I have some serious OCD. This was gonna be a problem. I wasn't gonna lose it, though, I was determined. It took everything I had not to.  I went right to work cleaning. I don't even remember beating the child. I don't think I did, after all!

So what do I whip out but my magic blue bottle: Fantastic Oxygen Action. No, this is not a paid advertisement. I just love this stuff. If I thought my insides were dirty, I'd drink it. It takes anything out of anything. I found this miracle product when we had cats. Nothing else would remove cat feces from the carpet where Shiggy, in her sickened stupor, decided to wipe her ass in a long streak across the light grey carpet in the main room. Did I mention we no longer have cats? Anywho, nothing from pet stores or off the internet worked. This stuff rocks!

I was finally able to remove all of the blue from the door, woodwork, carpet and everything else within ten feet. I was feeling pretty smug. I had a talk with the kidlets in which they were sternly warned against further shenanigans. I was sure this wouldn't happen again.

Did it happen again? Nope. I took it away before there was a chance. What was the final straw, you wonder? It was bedtime. The kids didn't really want to brush their teeth but they made it to the bathroom anyway, just for the Cool Blue. Well, my son swished. He managed to do this without spilling it anywhere! Then he immediately ran out to the living room to inform us that he didn't need to brush. His teeth, it seemed, didn't turn blue at all. No blue teeth no plaque and thus no need to brush.  I was amazed that he was capable of such logic. That was the last of the Cool Blue. I really need to go write to the Listerine company now.