I Cry Over Spilled Milk

We should just let Jake drink out of a normal cup, like the rest of us. Sure, he’d spill more, but he still manages to leak milk, staining everything that was pristine before he crowded our lives. Our couch constantly looks like bare-back prom night. Same with the carpet, chairs and our dining room table.

FUCK YOU sippy cups! Fuck your stupid name. Fuck how hard it is to clean you. And fuck the way you let milk congeal.

I do the dishes more than Amy. She disagrees, and she’ll be mad that I’m saying so. But I simply do, even though she has a way of making me doubt this. It plays out like this: I’ll have washed the dishes three nights in a row, and on the fourth night toward the end of dinner, she’ll say, presumptuously,

“Thanks for doing the dishes tonight.”

“Um, I’d say it’s your turn by now.”

“I’ve done them every night this week,” she’ll say.

“What? No you haven’t. I have.”

“No you haven’t.”

Like a Jew donkey, I’ll do them again because I can’t prove it. I’m going to set up a tri-pod in the kitchen and tape myself washing the dishes. That probably still won’t be enough evidence.

Back to the sippy cups. In some ways, Jake is becoming more cooperative. When he finishes his milk, he puts it in the sink himself. If he finds a cup from earlier in the day, he’ll say,

“Old milk. Jakey put in sink.”  Then from the living room, I’ll hear shattering glass and plates. Jake doesn’t simply drop the cup in; he fastballs it and walks away from the wreckage.

Cleaning sippy cups makes me angry. You can’t just place them face down in the dishwasher like normal cups or glasses. You must first irrigate them of their festering mung (more on that in a minute), then deconstruct them, separating top, straw and body.  Emptying the dishwasher sucks as it is, and disrupting your rhythm to reassemble the sippy cup makes it more of a bitch. The straws don’t help. Those crafty little bastards like to slip to the bottom of the dishwasher, making me crawl inside to find them. It’s not worth it, especially when you’re dealing with milk.

I don’t drink milk because I don’t like it, and I’m not a gentile. Milk worries me. I’ve always found that a liquid kept at room temperature remains a liquid.  That’s not the case with milk. Milk curdles. In sippy cups, milk curdles badly. Cleaning those sippie cups is the worst part of parenting. Changing a messy diaper, even if it’s baby rrhea isn’t as gross. You expect shit to smell like shit. You don’t expect sippy cups with old milk to smell like cadaver asshole. Okay, I’m using license. I don’t really know what cadaver asshole smells like. What I do know is that I’ll twist open the sippy cup, and the smell of regular ole’ asshole is released. You know what I’m talking about. You have days where you’ve neglected your bad place in the shower, and depending on how you sit throughout the day, you notice the not-so-fresh odor wafting from underneath. It’s disturbing that this takes place in our kitchen sink where we, you know, stack dishes that we eat from. The goopy, stinky milk drains into the garbage disposal, which simply farts the stench back up whenever I use it.

We’ve moved Jake from whole milk to one percent to skim. I think the next move is water. In a regular cup.