Today’s post is by Rachel Gonzalez (@Rockle on Twitter). The woman is coarse a comedienne as any I have come across on the Internet, and her avatar (see photo on the left) may, in fact, be the greatest avatar in the history of the online world, as she claims in the essay below. She is hilarious enough to make even a corpse chortle, and that is saying something.

Of course, it doesn’t take much to make a corpse make a noise. My sister relayed a story to me once about a friend in a medical program who was working with a cadaver. The body happened to fall (or something like that) off of the operating table, and when it landed, air was forced out of the lungs and through the vocal cords, making the corpse groan.

Rachel Gonzalez will make you groan with laughter. Like a corpse. In a medical course. Of course, of course. Of corpse, of corpse.

Her Twitter bio is as follows:

Mom / wife / arcane gnome mage / nerdess. Also general contributor to PrimeParentsClub.com. Oh, and butterpants crazy, also.

Check out her blog here:

http://rockle.blogspot.com/

I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I’ve ended up with somewhere north of two dozen parenting books in my house.

Well, scratch that – I know how it happened. Friends, family, and well-wishers see something on TV or the Internet about the hot new scheme in child-rearing – a sound bite about some exciting new educational or discipline technique – and they think, “Hey, who do I know who can test this out on their own kids, because I don’t have any?” And they run off and buy me the book.

What I’m not really sure about is why. Everybody who knows me knows that I am a voracious reader – in a good month, when “The Amazing Race” and “Fringe” are between seasons and there are no new episodes of “Phineas & Ferb,” I can get through six books or so (more if the smutty romances I have picked up are particularly smutty) – so I can kind of understand the thought process. Books are generally a thoughtful gift when you want to give me something.

But I’m going to be completely honest here: I’m an absolutely dreadful consumer of parenting-skills-related merchandise. I’m probably every author and publisher’s target market, since I’ll be the first person to tell you that I know absolutely diddly squat about raising a kid. But of all the parenting books I have on the shelves in the house, I’ve only gotten through two sentences of one manual – the famous Dr. Spock book, the one that begins thusly: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” That was all I had the time to read. Because – and here’s the not-so-shocking secret about parenthood – once you actually have the kid, you’re too busy trying to keep them alive to worry about whether you’re doing survival quote-unquote-correctly.

Who really has the time to read all those books? I know I sure don’t. I work full-time, and my husband works nights. So when I get home I have to handle making dinner most nights by myself, and when I finally wrangle my daughter into bed, I still have at least 3,000 housekeeping projects that need to get done – dishes, laundry, finding all the Legos that are cleverly hidden in the carpet before I step on them, hunting around for anything in the kitchen that does not contain natural ingredients because sometimes Mommy needs a little non-organic helper – and then, let’s be honest, those 17 episodes of Charmed on the TiVo are not going to watch themselves.

All the parents I know have their own little timebandits – not just the kids, either. Stuff that needs to be prioritized, organized, sanitized, bowdlerized, whatever-ized, and reading books about how to parent is usually at the bottom of the list, if it even occurs to anyone at all. Parenting books are Serious Business, but I don’t know anyone who’s actually been able to read all the way through anything with a title like How to Raise a Perfect Little Angel: Sixty Easy Steps to Getting Your Child to Act Like a Tiny Stepford Zombie, which is what almost all the parenting books I have are called.

Seriously: If step one is not “Seriously Consider Recreational Drinking and/or Pharmaceutical-Grade Narcotics for Either Yourself or Your Sweet Little Spawn – Whichever Is Easier,” then I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to work. Not in my house, anyway. Not for me, or for my kid – but then, neither of us is a textbook example of anything, except for tomfoolery (in my case) or badassery (in hers). And while I appreciate that it is important for us to raise our daughter so she does not eventually end up on the People of Walmart Web site or in a Girls Gone Wild video – she’s a kid. Kids are supposed to do goofy stuff and stick things up their noses and act like feral animals and occasionally go entire weeks where they eat nothing but pineapple and string cheese and Ritz crackers.

Still, people end up with parenting books, especially when they just went and had themselves a baby, so I’d like to help you separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and make a few recommendations. Almost everything you already have on your bookshelf can be probably be donated to your local library or re-gifted to some other poor fool who is expecting. But if you have any of the following titles, they are worth holding onto for that day in the probably-distant future when you might actually have some of that mythical “free time” to riffle through them.

  • Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only 9 Months, with Tools You Probably Have around the Home by Dave Barry. Dave Barry is one of my favorite writers in the English language, and in the interest of full disclosure I should probably admit here that back in 1992 when he was running for President, Mr. Barry promised to appoint me to the Supreme Court, even though I only asked to be considered as a candidate for Secretary of Education so I wouldn’t have to pay my student loans. This book is really funny, as Dave Barry books are wont to be. The best part about this book is that it is only 90 pages long, which means you can probably finish it before your new addition starts kindergarten, even if you only have a chance to read it in the bathroom during tornado warnings.
  • The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Parenting by Joshua Piven, David Borgenicht, and Sarah Jordan. No chapters here, just illustrated instructions on how to handle various – yes – worst-case scenarios covering all ages of your child’s life, including “How to Give Your Baby a Bath Without a Bathtub,” “How to Recapitate a Doll,” “How to Rid a Bedroom of Monsters,” “How to Tell If Your Child Was Switched at Birth,” and “How to Survive if Your Child Moves Back In.” Double-bonus-points for the inclusion of a sample “birds-and-bees” speech and an instant-messaging decoder, which is helpful if you are a Very Old Person, as I am.
  • Everyone Poops, by Taro Gomi – Okay, technically this is a children’s book and not a parenting book, but believe me when I tell you that potty-training is awful, and anything that makes it a little less awful is aces, in my opinion. Plus, even we grown-ups need reminders sometimes, because raising children does sometimes make us, um, clench up a little bit.
  • Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, illustrated by Ricardo Cortés. Believe the hype. Also technically a children’s book, but the sort that is likely to get you arrested. This book will help you get through those many long, dark, interminable nights when the kid won’t – you know.

(Oh, and by the way – you might have noticed that my taste in parenting books is a little more – shall we say – nontraditional? This is probably because when I was a small child my parents let me fall out of a camper, and then later on the same trip posed me on purpose with a cigarette in my mouth while holding a Zippo lighter, thereby creating what has become possibly the greatest avatar photo in the history of the Internet. All without the benfit of Photoshop, which did not exist in the 1970s when I was born and dinosaurs roamed the earth. My parents were not exactly appropriate either, but I have to say that they taught me that the single greatest thing you can have when you’re raising a child is a highly absurd sense of humor, which most of the parenting books most definitely do not have, which is why so many of them are effectively useless.)