Which is worse, that this is a photo of my five year old daughter barfing into a Coors Light bucket after leaving a bar on Saturday night or that her parents thought the image was so funny that they took a picture of her WHILE she was barfing into the Coors Light bucket on a Saturday night after leaving a bar?

Yeah.  We couldn’t decide either.


By way of explanation, I probably should offer up the details.  We were leaving Cantler’s in Annapolis, which is an excellent bar and crab house and she’d had too much soda, too much macaroni and cheese, and too much fun running around the parking lot with her brother and Uncle Booger.  We were in Cantler’s because we had to exorcise the demon of the Worst Date Ever, which occurred in 1998.  I was set up by a friend, and the guy was perfect nice, but it was immediately clear that there was ZERO chemistry and instead of just rolling with it, drinking some beer, eating some crabs, and calling it a night, he felt compelled to call his sister to come and join us on this date, presumably as some means of making it absolutely clear to me that he was NOT INTERESTED.  To make matters worse, a few weeks later he called to ask me to dinner again because he was “in town” and, I guess because his sister wasn’t anywhere accessible, he spent the evening staring over my right shoulder, presumably as his backup means of making it absolutely clear to me that he was NOT INTERESTED. 

Actually, it was my brother’s birthday and we met him and his wife and her fun family for dinner.  I didn’t realize Cantler’s was the scene of the crime most awkward date in the history of civilization until we got there.

At the end of a long week, every good family deserves a little quality time spent together.  You can close your eyes and picture the scene;  whatever the details, you imagine calm, peaceful, elegant surroundings in which you and your loved ones can reflect upon the previous days and renew your spirits for the weekend ahead.

“How does she do it?”  People query, “How does that Well Read Hostess bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and turn it into a special, healthy dining experience for her family in the relaxed comfort of their dignified home?”


                                                             

Excellent question, people.  Excellent question.

Here’s how to craft your own family Friday fabulousness:

1)  Order pizza because only a crazy person wants to cook on a Friday.  Chances are you’d have to go to the grocery store anyway because your pantry has been pillaged and your refrigerator raided by marauding munchkins all week and it is a truth universally acknowledged that the grocery store on a Friday evening is not unlike the seventh circle of hell, reserved (I think, my Dante is a little rusty) for liars and infidels.  Besides, no matter how polite your family may be, they’d rather have pizza than whatever you’re going to make anyway.  Get paper plates and napkins because dishes…they’re not happening tonight.  

2)  Upon arriving home, immediately slip into something more comfortable in order to set the mood.  NO.  Not THAT mood.  I’m not thinking silk hostess pajamas and velvet slippers.  I’m talking about setting the mood that says, “Momma’s tired.  Back off.”  I find that the t-shirt I use when I dye my hair or a painting sweatshirt and a pair of lacrosse shorts circa 1987 are perfect.  This outfit is not complete without happy socks.  What do you mean, “what are happy socks?”  Happy socks are those really ugly, bulky, probably mostly acrylic socks that make your feet feel not too hot and not too cold and help those feet of yours forgive you for all you’ve put them through earlier in the day.

3)  Take the phone off the hook, turn the cell phone off, turn the television on.  You heard me.  A little Phineas and Ferb never killed anyone and it will buy you a good hour or so of peace and quiet without anybody hitting anybody else or whining at you, “I’m Boooorrrreeeddddd.”  Make sure that the Oprah magazine or the Architectural Digest you stole from the dentist office is at the ready. 

4)  Try to get adopted by my mother.  She occasionally sends her cleaning people to my house.  This enables you to do two things: First, sometimes your house is clean which is awesome.  If you plan to host anything at all, try to schedule it for the day after the cleaning people come.  The second thing having your, I mean my, mother’s cleaning people come does is allow you to NOT clean anything at all for a full seven days before they are scheduled to come and justify your slovenly slothfulness by saying to yourself, “No point anyway….cleaning people are going to be here practically tomorrow.”  The only downside to this arrangement is that if you are like me, and not nearly as To the Manor Born as you’d like to be, having someone call you to schedule a time to come clean and refer to you in a Paraguayan accent as “Missy Kristin” makes you feel like some kind of socially irresponsible undemocratic mistress of colonialism. 

5)  After you’ve thrown the dinner dishes away and not cleaned anything, read the kids their before-bed-books “in the big bed” and let them fall asleep there.  This cuts down dramatically on the “lie with me,” “I am still hungry,”  “read me another book” nonsense.  In the meantime you can go downstairs and get a movie On Demand or watch the Bourne trilogy on a continuous loop.  Feel free to fall asleep on the couch.  You’re already in your pajamas, might as well.

6)  Don’t forget to set your alarm for soccer at dawn on Saturday.  Try not to drop the F bomb when the alarm goes off.