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.

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