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!