Best Parent Ever

The Best Parent Ever likes to lead a very active social life.  But who will watch their precious brood when all the babysitters are taken, and the non-white nanny is off visiting visiting relatives in El Salvador for the weekend?

Not to worry: the Best Parent is smart.  In fact, the Best Parent is so smart that they’re even smarter than other Best Parents. 

With all of this resourcefulness, the Best Parent turns to something called Pot Luck Childcare.  It’s like a pot luck dinner — but smarter!

Pot Luck Childcare starts when the smarter Best Parent is completely exhausted from spending as much as 5 minutes with their loudly-vocalizing children.  So, the smarter Best Parent calls up a dumber Best Parent and tries to invite themselves over for dinner.  But why would any self-absorbed Best Parent ever agree to this, regardless of intellectual abilities?  After all, they too are exhausted from spending as much as 5 minutes with their own loudly vocalzing children. 

Because the smarter Best Parent has said three magic words: pot luck dinner.  All the dumber Best Parent hears is: “Someone is bringing me free food!”

But THIS pot luck dinner is really just a trojan horse for free childcare.   For the price of a tossed salad, or some leftover soup in a Pyrex dish, the smarter Best Parent can casually release their brood into the house of the dumber Best Parent with impunity.  The dumber Best Parent is then primarily concerned with monitoring their own kids and those of the visiting Best Parent. 

Take note: it’s not REALLY about the dinner.  It’s about the smarter Best Parent tricking the dumber Best Parent into watching their children, while they relax in the dumber Best Parent’s house, flipping through their People magazines and drinking as much of their Trader Joe’s merlot as possible.

So take that, lesser parents of the world and their babysitters!  The Best Parent has replaced you with a dish of badly-cooked, green-bean casserole — and a couple of suckers called their friends!    

Feel free to keep the dirty Pyrex.

Polls close Sunday night at midnight. Please vote for the 2008 Dumbest Baby Name Ever!  We have chosen 6 finalists from nearly 500 entries submitted by readers. Results will be available in time for Mother’s Day. (After all, who else would you blame for a Dumb Baby Name?).

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Explanation of Finalist choices…

Abcde (pronounced “Absedee”) — We chose this for the sheer laziness of it. Need a baby name? Just take the first five letters of the alphabet.

EPSN (pronounced “Espin”) — More like W.T.F.? And what if the parents suddenly start watching Fox Sports instead? Probably the only thing worse than having an unwanted name tattooed on your flesh, is having your kid named after a network you no longer watch.

Orangello and Lemongello (pronounced like they are spelled, but with a “jello” sound) — We like these names because they sound like dessert or after-dinner drinks. The advantages to this is that you can be in a restaurant, shouting at your kids, and the waiter might think you’re just ordering very loudly. The next thing you know, a dish of something sweet and alcoholic shows up. Best Parent Ever wins again! (Added bonus: the urban dictionary defines Lemongello as “a given name meaning your butt is the widest part of your body.” Orangello means “the mother of all flotsam.”)

Nevaeh (”heaven” spelled backwards) — There is a whole subgenre of Dumb Baby Names in which a perfectly normal name is spelled backwards. Why? So the child can one day see “heaven” in the mirror? Or are these parents just dyslexic? And what happens when you combine a backwards spelling parent with a plain old lazy Dumb Name Parent. Can the name “Edcba” (”Abcde” backwards) be far behind?

Xy (pronounced “Zie”) — Is this child named after their chormosomal contents? Who knows! It was one of many outstanding X names submitted, including Xyler (pronounced “Zyler”) and Xyz (pronounced “Zice”). Face it: English-speaking people don’t know how to pronounce names that begin with X. So even if you named your kid Xavier, you’re still asking for trouble.

Shi’thead — Pronounced “Shi’thaad.” Maybe in some parts of the world this is a perfectly normal name. But here it is just pure evil parenting genius.

Vote now!

The Best Parent Ever realizes that every precious sapling has within it a demon seed; a progeny that defies even their fine-tuned sense of domestic engineering.  That’s why some say “it takes a village to raise a child.”  Unless you’re the Best Parent Ever, in which case you say: “I’m hiring Parenting Coach!”

And why not?  Parenting Coaches are expensive, fashionable, and they clearly announce the superior qualities of one’s breeding abilities even more than that $1,000 stroller that just casually ran over your foot at the farmer’s market.

The rest of the procreating world may be asking friends and family — even Yahoo Groups – for help with childrearing challenges.  But this does nothing for the Best Parent Ever, other than shine a dim, energy-saving lightbulb on how they are almost just like everybody else.  And that just won’t do — not when the Best Parent Ever can spend a substantial sum of money subcontracting their nurturing duties to a complete stranger.

So take that, grandma and grandpa!  Your childcare suggestions are useless unless you can sell yourself as a highly-paid professional.  But don’t worry — “parenting coach” is a vague enough job title, like life coach, consultant, executive producer, or even vice president. Who knows what those people really do?  The Best Parent Ever does: a parenting coach is someone who proves, once again, that they are sooooo much better than you. (And by the way? Their “coach” soooo told them to tell you that).