Dear friends of Kitty Time have an adorable and precious baby boy. We met him a few months ago and he is darling……and we were charmed by so many things about him…but what really struck us is that he had stinky drool.

And so we left after the weekend and found ourselves musing over how our precious little girl is such a girl..SHE doesn’t have stinky drool….and boys will be boys..so of course THEY have stinky drool.

Right?

Ha ha…we laughed…off into the sunsent.

When will parents ever learn, dear readers? When will they learn?

I am the first to jump on the train to mock other naive parents who think “that won’t happen to MOI.” Hell, somtimes I drive that train!

These parents think to themselves..Mais Non! Not Moi!

Right…..
YOU have a perfect baby! Your baby will always sleep all night! Your baby will never get messy when eating and throw his/her food all over the ground and your nice work clothes!
Your baby will never grow up and throw a temper tantrum in music class because she does not want to give back the bell she likes to shake (mais oui, it happened to me)

No no…your beautiful sweet baby will NEVER do these things….only other lazy, stinky, sloppy babies do these things…..

I mock those people who believe that about their child.

But yet – I did that.

I laughed about stinky baby boy drool.

And then it happened.

I walked into my daughter’s room yesterday after her nap. My beautiful, perfect, sweet, lovely baby girl.

And I was knocked off my socks by a stench.

What was this horrid, lethal killer of a smell wafting out of her beautiful and peaceful nursery? Was it another Russian spy trying to kill me? Or….

Could it be?

Was it possible?

Did she just graduate to STINKY DROOL?

I lifted her up…got a whif of her drooly, moist face….spotted her running nose (yet another cold?) and realized….it happened…..it came full circle….right back to us…..turns out sweet little baby girls can have stinky drool just as nasty as sweet little baby boys. They are equal opportunity droolers.

And my humble lesson for the day?

Whenever you think to yourself “that won’t happen to me” (whether you are contemplating having a baby, pregnant or a parent) – guess what, dear readers….

OH..it will…..it absolutely will.

So beware of what you mock…..you’ll only get it worse when you mock another…..and even worse..when you think….”it won’t happen to me” and ride off into the sunsent……

Dear Readers –

When I was a good feminist in college, studying all the ways women are kept down in this world, instead of obsessively reading gossip blogs and rags as I do now, one of the things that struck me the most was language. How language is powerful and there are awful, degrading words to describe women that just do not exist in the English language, for men.

We can all think of what many of these words are without me spelling them out…but I would like to add one to the list.

Nag.

When you hear nag – who do you think of first?

Admitt it, you think of your mother first.
Don’t deny this to kitty-time….I just call it like I see it, which is why you love moi.

So now that I am a mother…and a wife….I have a few things to say about this.

Nagging is a man’s word. Just like Thanksgiving is a man’s holiday.
Nagging exists because of men. Nagging is when you repeat something more than once b/c it didn’t get done the first time.

But the question is – WHY didn’t it get done the first time?
All of you husbands out there – you know the answer.

Because you didn’t allergy FEEL like doing it. Or you weren’t in the mood….or my favorite..you weren’t asked the right way the first time.

And so, let’s redefine the word nag. It is not something awful or annoying or shrill barking in your ear.

It is something that is being repeated again and again by an overworked wife…an overworked mother of your children that she birthed after hours of awful and painful labor…….and it is being said again because you, the husband, are too lazy to do it the first time.

Therefore…nagging is the result of male laziness…..and is a scarlet letter to be worn on the breast of an unhelpful husband, partner, or spouse.

For shame, lazy husband.

I do not have any brilliant solutions on how to avoid nagging…except that I will no longer think of it as an ugly thing that I am doing. Just as the French women do not consider themselves bossy or opinionated, rather, they know what they want.

When you hear yourself nagging…..it is because you know what you want..and you are determined…and will not stop until it gets done.

Go forth and nag, dear readers.