Summer reading lists are BS when you’re a parent

There is something that happens when you become a parent.  Some weird thing that changes your relationship with the space time continuum.  It’s like, time no longer moves as it once did.  Don’t believe me?  Ask any parent you know and they will tell you that once you have kids, time loses all meaning.

I mention this fact, because today is the 4^th of July.  Which is odd, since I swear St. Paddy’s Day was only yesterday.

The fourth has always felt like summer’s half way point to me.  Just like Memorial Day is the unofficial start to summer, the Fourth of July is the unofficial middle. 

This also means that we are up to our belly buttons in the traditional summer festivities- lazy pool days, fireworks, the beach, beers, BBQ’s…

At least, that’s how it used to be.

These days summer means vigorously reapplying sun screen to people that DON’T WANT TO WEAR SUNSCREEN, making sure the freezer is always stocked with popsicles, and trying to keep chunky baby thigh rolls clean and dry – a job I never knew existed until this summer.

Not that I’m complaining (she says, complainingly).

Actually, real talk, it still beats the hot sweaty hangovers that used to come with the pre-kid summer festivities.  You haven’t lived until you’ve suffered from the worst hangover of your life in a house with no air conditioning.

And while yes, I may miss indulging on occasion, the thing I miss most is my summer reading.

I discovered quite quickly last year that summer reading as a parent is way different than summer reading when you’re childfree.

While I can’t say I haven’t done any reading this summer, I can say, it’s just not the same as what I’m used to.  Long gone are the days of floating around the pool for hours while pouring over the Aurora Teagarden series.

These days, I’m lucky to read an article on Facebook from start to finish in a sitting.

But, I do still read. And I present to you – My Summer Reading List 2017:

• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See? by Bill Martin and Eric Carle. Read – six hundred times.  It’s short, it’s interactive, it’s cute… the first two hundred times.  Then it becomes the thing that you mutter under your breath while folding laundry.  “Pair of socks, pair of socks, what do you see?  Not me folding your silly ass.  Into a ball you go!”  My mother also thoughtfully brought my daughter the companion piece- Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What do you See? All I can say about it is that it compares to the Halloween Franchise, where as the first book is all of the Halloween movies except for Season of the Witch (the 3^rd installment), which is what the Panda book is.
• Happy to be Healthy, by Doc McStuffins (I don’t know, maybe?) Read – two hundred times. The good news is that it takes about one minute to read this book from cover to cover, so it’s not really a huge time-suck here.  The bad news is that if a book only takes a minute to read, you’re going to have to read it five times in a row so that your kid feels like they are getting their money’s worth.
• Approximately fifteen more articles on potty training, written by various authors. Read, each one once.  I started looking into this last year based on some vicious lies that my mother told me.  I decided that I would hold off on potty training until the toddler showed more interest.  Yet here we are a whole year later and I’m still like, “Do you want to sit on the potty?  What if I give you a sticker?  How about some toys?  A candy cane?  How about I agree to buy you your first house?!”  (If this is on next summer’s reading list again, I’m going to set something on fire.)
• It, by Stephen King. Read – 86% (god bless my Kindle).  My progress is pretty impressive considering I started this over three months ago and I usually can only manage a few pages a week.  However, one of the perks of a new baby that they don’t talk up enough is how you get to pull all-nighters, and read as much as you want to… with one eye open… at 3AM… while everyone around you sleeps. 
• Several Google searches about newborn poop because, newborns.
• One Google search to see if there was a legal loophole for bitch slapping people that complain about not getting enough “me time,” when I literally held another person on my lap while I pooped this morning. For the record, there is not.

Until next year…