January 28, 2016 by Amy

Care for a drink?

It appears we have a drinking problem.

I was cleaning out the fridge this week, trying to scrounge some meals from the various left-overs we store in there with the best of intentions, when I realized something. We have a drinking problem. As evidenced by how many drinks we have in our fridge. We have way more drinks than food. Right now, in my fridge, you could help yourself to:

• Skim milk
• 2% organic milk
• Chocolate milk
• Sweet tea
• Lemonade
• Ginger beer
• Summer Shandy beer
• Oculto beer
• Rhinegeist beer
• Wine
• Bloody Mary mix
• Mocha coffee drink
• Caramel coffee drink
• Apple juice
• Mango tangerine juice
• Peach & mango juice
• Pomegranate and blueberry juice
• Gatorade
• Bottled water
• Fitz’s root beer
• 2 Diet Cokes

It’s a wonder we have room for any food.

I don’t think the average family needs this variety of drinks. Nearly every single night for dinner we drink milk or water. That’s it. Where in the heck did all these other drinks come from?

Okay, I’ll take credit for the sweet tea. I love sweet tea. I only drink it on the weekends, because it has caffeine and I’d never be able to sleep at night if I had it past 1 p.m. It is the elixir of the gods. On Saturday and Sunday. Same, actually, with the cold coffee drinks. Clearly I place a high priority on weekend beverages, which just sit around and sigh about being ignored during the work week.

The juice is all M and Zoe. They love juice. I don’t know if they realize they have four different kinds of juice in there at one time, though. It seems excessive. I really, really love sweet tea and I don’t have four different kinds of tea in there. And consider this: their juices have five different fruits. It’s like Chiquita Banana is throwing a party in there.

The beer, wine and bloody Mary mix really ought to be downstairs with the other booze in the Beer Fridge, with its own ilk. It’s bringing down the overall classiness of our fridge, cavorting with the non-alcoholics like that. The alcohol is clearly trying to stealthily infiltrate. I found the two cans of Rhinegeist in the crisper, cozying up to some broccoli and using bad pick-up lines like, “Nice stems.”

Upon further inspection, the Gatorade and chocolate milk are all opened and in states of half-drunkenness. Clearly these are remnants of Zoe’s semi-consumption and should be disposed of. This is not surprising, for I have never seen the child actually finish a drink, no matter how much she was given to begin with. It’s like she is averse to seeing the bottom of a glass or bottle. If we give her a glass with a cup of milk at dinner, she has a half-inch left in the bottom at the end. If we give her a glass with a half-inch of milk, she’ll take one small sip and leave the rest. It’s her special gift.

I just checked. Looks like the lemonade and wine are past their prime, too. Yeesh.

Apparently I will need to don a hazmat suit and wade in.

Let me just make a nice glass of sweet tea first.

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