User:Mad Margaret
This is actually what my life is now about...wine and babies. The latter enforce the former.
No one can have any appreciation of the desperate need for wine until they have children. It starts insidiously with the inability to drink at all during pregnancy. The body does occasionally crave a fine Pinotage, but it somehow knows that it would be a very bad thing and common sense prevails. The birth of one or (if you are very, very, very bloody lucky) two little gnomes may make one scream I Need A Drink; but again, the Common Sense Fairy tells you that all the alcohol you consume will be directly fed via your nipple into the mouths of those screaming little gannets.
So you refrain. And then you find your day has structure, the hours creep on apace and life becomes more relaxed. Suddenly, there is light at the end of the tunnel - that swirling vortex of nappies, bottles, boobs, insomnia, vomit, diarrhoea and the never ending mountain of washing. Your children can fall asleep and even more than that, they can fall asleep at the same time each night. And so you reach for your Montepulciano and quaff the sweet nectar of the Gods. Now your life has a purpose; to reach the hour of the day when they sleep.
But it does not end there. They grow up. They become toddlers and now your life is changing. Where once you relaxed at nap time, now you work like dervish to complete the myriad tasks before the angels wake again and most of that is clearing up the destruction from their morning "play." So now the day is not one of structure, but simply fire fighting until that magic time - no, not bedtime, but a preconditioned acceptable hour in which to begin drinking.
It usually starts at around 7pm, but that soon seems a very long time to wait and it creeps up to 6. Bearing in mind that drinking is normally quite acceptable "after the sun is past the Yardarm" and that would actually have been 11am, it seems perfectly reasonable to have a large tipple at 6. On reflection, it's positively a master class in self restraint. Well, I must go. The sun has not only passed the yardarm, but it's hanging at a rather rakish angle and there appear to be two of them; perhaps drinking from 11am is not the best idea after all. Now where did I leave the kids?
--Mad Margaret (talk) 11:23, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
