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Parenthood

One wearying aspect of parenthood is: the products. I'm not asking for advice here. Also, I recognize my privilege (at least some of the time). I know I'm extraordinarily lucky and--for example--I'm not dealing with home-schooling during Covid, etc. (Praise be to Jesus!)

As my toddler begins to assert his will, I feel special disdain for Pampers water wipes. This is because you can't just pluck a water wipe from the packaging; one wipe brings along a trail of seven additional wipes, and you have to peel a wipe away from the extras, using a thumb and forefinger. This is while your other hand is restraining your child so that he doesn't (a) throw himself from the changing table or (b) drag his digits through the mushy shit that has semi-adhered to his thigh, or (c) both (a) and (b), simultaneously.

I also hate the sippy cup, which my son regards as a personal enemy. He holds it, and studies it, and throws it across the room. I think it's grimly humorous that the sippy cup is billed as "no-drip"; I think of this every time the cup spills its milk all over the couch, or the pants I'm wearing, or the living-room floor.

I hate that the Nuby transitional pre-sippy-cup pseudo-cup comes with a Proustian set of instructions, in an eight-point font, and I wonder if my child is meant to read these instructions? They surely can't be meant for me, because no middle-aged set of eyes could accomplish any meaningful work with that particular font.

Most of all: The Dr. Brown bottle set. Oh my God. You need a private lab to deal with this thing. You need to be Walter White, from "Breaking Bad." Just murmur, in a soothing way, in your screaming child's ear, while your left hand attempts to pluck out the semi-hardened milk curds from the small tan stopper-disc.....Then carefully place the half-clean stopper disc in the little blue intestine, and jam the intestine-disc unit back into the bottle....and grab the nipple and the nipple-restraint and run a thumb over the nipple opening because even one half-speck of formula may result in nipple-clogging....and your kid can't *tell* you about the nipple-clogging....You just need to keep an eye on the sipping action, like Miss Marple, and try to infer from the liquid-level and the volume of your child's screaming whether any successful sipping has actually occurred.

That's all. I must go now and address the strange urine odor that is emanating from my child's car seat. I have my cleaning solution. I have my towel. I'm ready to spray, to wait, to blot. 
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