The Top Five Parenting Hacks You Never Knew You Needed

I am tired. I am sick and I have a husband and a child at home that I homeschool and I don’t sleep well and my body hurts and I AM TIRED. So, “make my life easier in any way humanly possible” is my motto. Ask and ye shall receive! The internet provides and it provides in the form of hacks.

You may be asking yourself, what exactly are hacks, Christine? Well, I’m glad you did. Hacks, as defined by Urban Dictionary (the site that gave us 453 phrases for sex acts that will send you straight to hell), are clever solutions to tricky problems. Hacks make life simpler.

Well, at least that’s how it was supposed to be, but as the internet provides, the internet also taketh away. The term hack is now everyone’s favorite overused buzzword. It’s clickbait. So, even if that clever idea in the latest internet article has more steps than an IKEA bunk bed instruction manual, they’re still calling it a hack. Case in point, Zooey Deschanel.

No, she’s not the hack, but according to the internet she has a genius parenting “hack” to get her kids to eat their veggies. She’s grown a garden. See, it’s just that simple to get your little Suzy or Tom to like okra. Grow a fucking garden. Warm up the tractor, put on your best overalls, till the soil, fight plague and pestilence, overcome locust swarms, water, weed, repeat, and grow a motherfucking garden.

And I’m not hating on Zooey for growing a garden. Bully for her and her two spawn, Elsie Otter and Charlie Wolf. No, I didn’t make those names up. Those are the actual names of her actual children that came from her actual body. She named them that, and not ironically, I don’t think. I could hate on her for that, but not for growing the garden.

I’m hating on the internet for calling something as labor and time intensive, as complicated, as backbreaking as growing a motherfucking garden a hack. It’s not. Now, perhaps I’m bitter because I have found it impossible to keep the one houseplant I have in my possession alive. But, counterpoint, growing a garden is not a hack. So there.

Unless the definition of hack has been changed to now include any idea, no matter how convoluted and complex. If that’s the case, baby have I got some hacks for you. The first one is, don’t name your children Elsie Otter and Charlie Wolf. Go big or go home. Don’t hide the good stuff in the middle name. They should be called Otter Elsie and Wolf Charlie or nothing at all.

And here are some other hacks you never knew you needed because, the fact is, you didn’t.

Teaching your child to tie their shoes has never been this easy!

Raise cattle from calf to full grown cow. Slaughter and skin them for their hides. Soak the hides overnight. Now begins the arduous task of scraping fur and flesh from those hides. Get the kids involved! They’ll look back fondly on this step and feel grateful that they wear shoes and aren’t cows. Tan the hide. Dry the hide. Become an old timey cobbler and craft a pair of shoes for your child. Don’t give up now. What kind of mother are you? Then, go to Target, pick up some shoelaces and find a YouTube video on how to tie those shoelaces. If that doesn’t work just make them wear slip ons until they move out of the house.

Made a mess with glitter? Clean it up the easy way.

Sell the house or burn it down and collect the insurance money.

It’s the only way.

Keep wrapping paper neat, organized, and wrinkle free.

Forget fancy and expensive single use plastic containers! Use a clean wastebasket and stand your tubes on end inside one. You can tuck all your wrapping paper out of the way and keep it neat in the back of any closet to keep for later use. Except here’s the thing, you’re going to forget that you have it because it’s tucked out of the way in the closet.

So, one time you’re going to need to wrap a present for that stupid friend of your kid who decided to have his birthday at the germ factory known as Chuck E. Cheese and think you have no wrapping paper. You’ll go out, buy more wrapping paper, find a clever way to store that wrapping paper on Pinterest, buy another garbage can and then discover your hidden stash of wrapping paper in the back of closet. Now you’ve got an extra garbage can and one more damn roll of wrapping paper to store. This will continue each and every month for the duration of your life until you have to claim bankruptcy because you’ve gone into debt buying wrapping paper and garbage cans.

Use Command Hooks for everything!

Want to keep your necklaces from tangling? Command Hooks! Hanging a wreath on your glass door? Command Hooks! Toothbrush holder? Command Hooks! Hanging curtains in a dorm? Command Hooks! Want to impeach a president? Command Hooks! Marriage falling apart? Command Hooks! Need a new kidney? Command Hooks! Have to hide a body? Command Hooks!

Command Hooks! Command Hooks! Command Hooks!

Don’t waste money on a Slip and Slide! Try this hack instead.

Simply purchase an inexpensive tarp and stake it into the ground with uh, I don’t know, nails. Or maybe large screws? Twigs? Bricks? I have no clue. Something completely unsafe that will cause bodily harm and certainly guarantee at least one trip to the E.R.

Up the ante by slathering your tarp with dish soap so the kids really go flying down that hill and snag their flank on a few screws going down. And place it on the steepest hill in your yard so after they almost sever a limb they can sustain a head injury by slamming into the fence at a high rate of speed. Make the injuries count so you can also face the threat of lawsuits from the parents of your children’s friends.

See, parenting hacks can really make the job just that easy! As easy as it is for Zooey and her motherfucking garden and her broccoli eating kids, Dances with Wolves and Dead Man Walking. Or whatever their names are. Peppa Pig and Dame Edna? I don’t know. Something like that.