Newborns Are like Sangria*

Delicious. Deceptively innocuous.  Yummy and sweet. Seemingly harmless. You get the point. Last week, as I scrolled through precious pictures of a good friend's new baby and remembered my first days with Toddler and Baby, something genius occurred to me:

All new moms want to be kidnapped.  Yes. True.

So, I emailed my friend and said: Pick one night next week and I am kidnapping you for a cocktail.

The shocker? She was game.

So, on Tuesday night, after we all put our babies to bed, four of us "mommy friends" hit the stellar new Upper West Side Latin-Caribbean-influenced tapas and wine bar Cava for some much-needed sangria.

We had a great time, sipping the sweet concoction, nibbling on the cute little cubes of fruit. We talked and talked. About everything. Motherhood. Professional basketball. Preschools. Obama. Yes, though the occasion was to celebrate my good friend's newborn who was presumably snug as a bug with her daddy at home, we managed to talk about things other than our beloved babies. This was a real treat.

The hours ticked by and at 1am, I crawled into bed next to sleeping Husband. And before I nodded off, a smug sangria-soaked smile splashed across my face and I thought: Look at me, world. I'm a rebel. A cool mom. I stayed out past midnight. BUT. Then I woke up five hours later with the girls, legitimately perplexed as to why my head was pounding.  All I had was a little sangria.  Really not that much. Truth was I had a big bad Sangover.

So the day was long and coffee-filled.  I went to bed at 7:30pm.  But a week-plus later, I once again think of sangria fondly.  As a delicious and tantalizing treat. And seven months after giving birth, I remember the first days with Baby as nothing but delightful. Why is it that we are so quick to forget the toll these cocktails and cuties take on us?

* Will someone please teach me the rules of capitalization in titles? I kind of care about these things. I think it looks weird that "like" is not capitalized, but per my research, I'm forbidden from capitalizing a preposition. Not an emergency, but I want to get this right. Grammar gods and goddesses, please help!