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I’m Baaaaaaaaack….

Did you wonder if you’d ever hear from me again?  I wondered, too. I kind of thought I wouldn’t be back – that the Scamp was not motherhood-friendly.  I’ve been blogging, off and on, at Careening and Gestating, and now at Wigglet McFancyPants.  But it was pretty impossible to keep Scamping when I had no taste for wine while pregnant and then insufficient courage to risk wine drinking while feeding a colicky baby nothing but my breastmilk.

Colic?  Ugh. Don’t get me started.

I finally started drinking wine again a month or so ago, almost more as medicine than for enjoyment.  Returning to the Scamp with little money and less time to taste wine is going to be a challenge, but I hope that you, dearest reader, will suffer through it with me.  I imagine that more than a few of the denizens of the Mystical Interwebs find themselves equally challenged, both financially and temporally.

On that note, here are tips for all those New Mother Wineaux out there:

1.) Drink cheap.  exersaucers and convertible car seats and diapers and baby pools and rompers and, most of all, DAY CARE, has begun to act as a budget-eating virus on your life.  Evidently, this doesn’t end for a long time.  Once you start drinking wine again, you’re going to want to do it a lot, so don’t imagine that you’re going to be quaffing Sine Qua Non – or even Shafer – until the little tyrant is at least in high school.

2.) Drink simple.  The last thing I want to think hard about after a long day of work, child ferrying, breast pumping, rushing through traffic, scraping leftovers into a semblance of dinner and getting the kid to FINALLY go to sleep… well, the last thing I want to puzzle over is a complex, hard-to-warm-up-to bottle of wine.  The pleasures reserved for new parents are simple ones.  Use your brain power to eke out more than 10 minutes to yourself every week.

3.) Drink food-friendly.  If you’re breastfeeding, you’re probably going to be drinking a glass of wine with dinner.  If you’re not breastfeeding, you probably need to multi-task and will be drinking a glass of wine with dinner.  And since dinner in my household – I don’t know about yours; maybe you have Chateaubriand every night! – but since dinner in my household is a PBJ about twice a week, I stock my fridge with wine that’s high in acidity and low in tannin.  As an example, Viognier + PBJ = 🙁

4.) Drink a lot.  Ha!  Just kidding. I figure that a glass of wine with dinner at night will, at worst, encourage the Wigglet to sleep better that evening.  I have not done any research, internet or otherwise, so I am currently Making This Shit Up to the Nth degree.  For the record, I hate Pump & Dump.  It’s such a pain in the ass to express breast milk that I can NOT just throw it away.  I’d rather exercise a little restraint.  Especially considering that’s all the exercise I get these days!

I’ll be trying to give you a run-down of some of my favorite wines that fulfill all of the above guidelines.  If this can help a wine-deprived soul up to her elbows in poop and spit up, all the better!

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That was awkward

Humorous Pictures
more cat pictures

OK, so the Scamp doesn’t like me laying my heavy trips on everyone who trips on in here looking for a tasty glass of wine. However, I have a lot of heavy trips (and preggo-related anecdotes/points of interest) on my mind lately. Add to this situation the fact that I could personally be responsible for the decline in wine sales this year (I made this up – I have no idea if wine sales are down) and we have here what The Dread Pirate Roberts would call an impasse.

So I propose to Have My Cake And Eat It Too in the following manner: I will write about being pregnant, etc at my new blog careening & gestating from now on. I advise you, gentle reader, that there will be more writing over there for the time being. If I can careen my way into getting my head on straighter, the Scamp and c&g might just find themselves living as happy siblings. Meanwhile, when I drink a wine I have something to say about, or when I drink any wine at all, you shall hear about it here are the Scamp as per usual. (There is a bottle of Chenin Blanc in my fridge that’s been slowly jostling up to the front of the shelf.)

My hope is that I can land in that elusive place where I can manhandle both wine key and breast pump with equal dexterity. And isn’t that what all of us want, way down deep inside?

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The Cost of Change

Well Ms. Scamp went to the office today and realized older browsers (most notably Internet Explorer 6.0) don’t like our fancy translucent backgrounds and fades. Rest assured dear readers I’m working on it, sorry for the inconvenience. Right now we’re looking at how many folks are affected. So let us know in the comments if it is a problem when you view the page.

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I feel pretty

Hey, check it y’all! My beloved Mr. Scamp spent most of his long weekend re-working my site, and I love it!

We put up ads of course, because it’s time that all my mad fame and glory translate into some Huge Bucks. But then, please note the fancy calendar and the drop-down menus up above for categories and other power moves. The site search engine is not working perfectly just at this time, but will be resolved within the next couple of 3 weeks or so, Google permitting.

Many thanks to Mr. Scamp, Chief Technological Officer at Wine Scamp Industries, for all his hard work and patience with my tweak requests.

Whaddya think, gentle reader? Do you love my makeover? Is it slimming? Would Stacy London approve?

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Pardon My Dust

Hi, I’m Tom. I’ll be screwing up Ms. Scamp’s site for the next few hours. Sorry about that. But don’t go away, it will be improved and better than ever (especially since the important bit, her writing, will still be intact).

The RSS subscribe link is back up (thanks for reminding me!). But if you come here and it looks different than it did a day ago (or even an hour ago) I’m working on it. And as always feedback is welcomed.

Thanks for your patience,

Mr. Scamp