Parents need more than milk

Parenting leads to long days, and apparently Mom and Dad each need a drink.

Two new books, “Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay – and Other Things I Had To Learn as a New Mom” (Simon Spotlight) and “Daddy Needs a Drink: An Irreverent Look at Parenting From a Dad Who Truly Loves His Kids – Even When They’re Driving Me Nuts” (Delacorte Press) leads one to believe that there are a lot of parents out there who feel they’re in over their heads.

One of the most overwhelming moments of fatherhood for Robert Wilder came early on when he offered to change his daughter’s diaper when they were at a Macaroni Grill restaurant. It was his wife’s birthday, so he thought he was doing the right thing.

“When my daughter was born, we’d read all the books,” said Wilder during a recent phone interview. “The first couple of weeks were pretty good, and we lulled ourselves into a false sense of complacency.”

That was his first mistake.

Not only was he forced to choose between a dirty floor or slick sink as a makeshift changing table, but his daughter “exploded” while her diaper was off, leaving a job that he thought would require a professional cleaning crew, not one sleep-deprived man.

“I had no idea a human being could do that. And I was in charge. … I was totally unprepared for that,” Wilder said.

The common theme through both the daddy book and the mommy one by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor – no relation to the Wilders – is that nothing and no one warned them about the little daily challenges that come with children. They’ve since learned to embrace them, but to do that they also had to accept that they weren’t going to be “perfect” parents. The good news was that they realized neither was anyone else.

Being Mom or Dad also didn’t mean they had to become the middle-America stereotype that they loathed. Wilder-Taylor writes about her strong aversion to women in neon sweatbands.

Wilder considers himself a pretty funny guy by nature but, he said, he was afraid to be funny – which meant afraid to be himself – around children.

“I remember the first day we brought (daughter) Poppy home. We had bought the plastic bathtub and we totally screwed it up. I called a friend who had her kids a while ago. She said you don’t have to everything right every day. She said we could laugh about it,” he recalled.

“It’s comforting to know that everyone is struggling and that you’re allowed to have a sense of humor about it all.”

Wilder’s first chapter is about how his wife and her sisters began hoarding baby names when they were still prepubescent. He recalls the day she suggested Hemingway as the name for their unborn daughter:

” ‘Where’d you get that name anyway?’ I asked, slightly changing the subject. She shrugged. ‘From my list.’

“I then became enlightened on one of the strange behaviors of the Carroll sisters and, as I found out later, other women I have met. Starting at the age of pretend-weddings with younger siblings or household pets, some women keep lists of names for their future children.”

That was the beginning of the rest of his life.

Now Wilder, who is a high school teacher in New Mexico and columnist for the Santa Fe Reporter, lives with his artist wife Lala, Poppy, who is now 10, and son London, 5.

Wilder-Taylor, 39, lives in Los Angeles with 18-month-old daughter, Elby. She’s a TV writer and producer and she has performed on “Make Me Laugh,” “Evening at the Improv” and on Comedy Central.