What I’m about to describe to you is like this, except the shark is me and Rihanna is cheese.
I have this thing for Safeway’s generic-brand string cheese. (Just stay with me here; I promise I have a point.) They’re sort of like large, very mildly mozzarella-flavored plastic gummi worms, and I cannot stop eating them. I eat them for breakfast when I’m in a rush to get out of the house; I eat them for snacks; I eat them at in bed at 11PM (sneakily, though, so Kendrick doesn’t hear me, because eating crappy string cheese in the dark is a sort of embarrassing thing to do). Mostly, though, I eat them when I’m watching my hour of bad TV that I watch every night (or, okay, sometimes I watch two hours, but in my defense The Bachelor is kind of a TV emergency. Also #Lace4Eva).
When I was pregnant, I decided to knit my daughter a blanket (still have a point, hold on). And then when I was finished with that, I decided to knit my friend’s daughter a blanket. And then another friend’s daughter. And I did this not because I especially love knitting (although I do), but rather because having something to keep your hands busy during the evening TV-watching session both makes you feel like you’re being somewhat productive (as opposed to doing absolutely nothing save for slowly destroying your brain cells), and also makes you not eat twenty string cheeses in a row, because you can’t when your hands have things that aren’t cheese in them.
Which brings me to the much-touted Point.
This coloring book (created by my glam | camp partner Erin exclusively for our shop) is my new blanket.
Except in this book, there is nary a peaceful fairytale creature nor yogic floral mandala in sight. No no. Instead, there is this:
And this:
There are also images of “sexy date nights” (leave the pizza on the bed and do not touch me on your way out, please and thanks), postpartum paper dolls, and what a house with a small child looks like every day until 7PM (that would be “bad”). It’s not just a coloring book; it’s one of the funniest (and most honest) depictions of parenthood out there.
Last night, my friend Alisa came over to hang while our kids played, and we sat around my dining room table with some wine and coffee (and yes I absolutely do drink both at the same time, with astounding frequency #sorrynotsorry). I plopped a plate of Party Meatballs (yassss) down on the table, then turned to Alisa and said, “Feel like coloring?” Assuming, of course, that I would get a side-eye and “I have better things to do. Like anything.”
But her response?
“I LOVE COLORING.”
…Does everybody love coloring?
Huh.
Apparently they do.
And so we sat down, and we colored, and we talked. And while we talked we added little green hairbows to pictures of screaming children on airplanes and colored in the shopping bags of little old ladies lecturing new mothers in Trader Joe’s. We discussed the fact that children poop in the bathtub, because REALLY? (Yes. They really do.) We showed each other iPhone shots of how our kids reacted to Santa the first time they saw him. (Poorly.) We talked about how nothing fits anymore. And sibling rivalry. We wondered whether it was okay that our sons just inhaled twenty fruit gums (each).
Look, you can bring home this book and color it on your own; that’s fun. You can put it on your coffee table and let people page through it and laugh; that’s fun, too. But you know what I think you should do with it? Ask a friend over. Ferret out the half-chewed crayons stashed behind your couch cushions and under your bed and in your kid’s Lego bucket. And draw. And talk. And while you add reds and blues and greens to those bathtub toys and packets of wipes and piles of Cheerios, let yourself just go ahead and bask in the consuming, exhausting, hilarious, messy, heartbreaking, ludicrous, and – above all – joyful rollercoaster that is becoming a mama.
Being a parent is hard. It’s good to laugh. This book helps you do it.
You can pick up a coloring book here (and please be aware that they ship out complete with pom poms and glittery stickers and buttons with cats and pictures of exhausted mothers on them, because really, shouldn’t everything?).
