My Future Baby Shower Gift to All Expecting Parents

"I WANT FOOD! I WANT MILK! I WANT SHOW! I WANT BOOK! I WANT WATER! I WANT JUICE!" Audrey tries every one of these every night before bed. The good news: I rarely give in (and when I do, it's the water request). The bad news: I allow her to vocalize these demands for way too long before just putting her in bed. We have a routine....bath, jammies, 5 books, rock, bed. It NEVER changes...YET I still have to deal with the requests (I guess they are a part of the routine). Oh, I should mention the requests are accompanied by flailing and crying and sad/cute faces. Half of the time I am laughing.

So...in case you live under a rock and never surf the net, I thought I'd post this new book that's all the rage. It doesn't even come out until October and it's already been to the top of the bestseller lists. Jen, I think you will appreciate this more than anyone...since we have such similar ways of parenting (including admitting walking in front of a mack truck sometimes sounds like a good idea).

Also, here is an excerpt from a Macy Halford post / review on the newyorker.com:

The book is super funny, and the art, by Ricardo Cortés, is perversely sweet, so sweet and genuine that it made me cringe. Nothing has driven home a certain truth about my generation, which is approaching the apex of its childbearing years (I’m thirty-one), quite like this deranged book: we are not really adults. Maybe it’s the Wes Andersonification that happened to us in our early twenties (plus also of course the coddling by our own parents, which is still going on, even among my friends who do have children). Whatever the cause, it is definitely the case that, when faced with a kid who refuses to go to sleep, we get annoyed, like all parents before us, but, rather than just abandoning the child to the dark and telling it that it can go to sleep or stay awake as it likes but it is staying in the bed until morning (remember Proust at the opening of “Swann’s Way”?), we sit there with it, reading to it and singing to it and distracting it with swirling night lights until it decides it feels like going to sleep, all the while thinking to ourselves, Go the fuck to sleep, kid.

The rage! So repressed it has to be sublimated into a children’s book! The contours of the precise ways in which we will fuck up the next generation begin to emerge…

Purchase at Amazon.com.