1. Eating food that has been expelled from a two-year old’s mouth. My two-year old will regularly hand me food from his plate. If I’m not on top of my game, I’ll just go ahead and absently pop it in my mouth, realizing milliseconds too late that it’s a half-chewed bite he’s found fault with.
2. Online shopping. A danger at the best of times, but especially bad for sleep-deprived parents who have communicated with no one over the age of four in a day and a half, and now have the judgment of a piece of tuna… “patent leather Chuck Taylor high tops? Yeah, I want those! Pretty and practical.” (True story.)
3. Over abundance of good, fresh coffee all day long. No workplace trudge all the way to the lunchroom for lukewarm dregs here. Nope. We’ve got french-pressed Starbucks within reach all day long. As long as I use a cup the size of my head I can claim to keep it under six cups or so a day, but we all know that’s not true.
4. Inability to ever finish a thought or sentence. I am so used to being interrupted that when I have the opportunity to converse with a calm, quiet grown-up and actually finish a sentence, I’ve lost the ability to follow through. I can multitask like the dickens, but by the time I get to the middle of the sentence, I’ve forgotten how it started. I have to distract my conversational partner from my lapse, “So, as I was saying about Obama’s health care proposal… Hey, who wants brownies????”
5. Relying too heavily on the opinion of a four-year old. Don’t get me wrong, my four-year old has discerning judgment in a lot of areas. Ice cream for dinner and staying up late to watch one more episode of Dinosaur Train are legitimately great ideas. But when I don’t see another adult for a day or more at a time, I find myself trusting his opinion on topics he may not be qualified for. He thought the black patent leather Chuck Taylors were a great idea.
