Yesterday afternoon I sat around a backyard table with seven women and their multitude of one and two and three-year-old children. By far the worst behaved and most annoying children where those Leta's age, and God does that make me feel so much better about my 15-month-old GOBLIN WHOSE NOSE CAN SHOOT FIRE AT AN OBJECT 20 FEET AWAY.

This stage Leta is in, the one where she can't communicate except by moaning and reaching toward something and refusing to walk or crawl to where she wants to be and instead summoning all the demons of Hell to help her create such a noise that indicates I must pick her up or have my intestines burned out by the squall of Satan Himself, this stage is the reason people decide to bring only one child into the world.

My friend has three kids under the age of three, one of them only a couple weeks older than Leta, and she admits that she honestly doesn't remember this stage with her first one BECAUSE THIS IS DEFINITELY SOMETHING SHE WOULD HAVE REMEMBERED. She made a brilliant comparison between what's happening now with Leta and her second child and what it was like to reach a point in a relationship with someone when they start to do things that annoy you to the point that you can't take it anymore and so you break up.

"It's like, this person starts to chew spaghetti a certain way, a horrible way, and you can't stand to watch him eat spaghetti because it annoys you so much, but you know that if you stay together you're going to have to watch him eat spaghetti that horrible way again so you just break it off so that you don't have to endure the agony. BUT YOU CAN'T BREAK UP WITH YOUR KID."

In our cases it's the way Leta and her kid MOAN and reach for something simultaneously ALL DAY LONG. The sound of that moan, The Soundtrack To A Slow And Painful Death, is the reason red wine tastes so fucking good at the end of the day.