#100, PRIME and other fashionable drinks

I started I’ll Be Right Back in 2016 and some of the very earliest issues were about breastfeeding. This is the 100th issue of I’ll Be Right Back and it’s about my children’s love of caffeinated drinks. That’s the only way you can tell that time has passed though; nothing else has changed, not the president elect and not my face.

I wasn’t prepared for how much I’d think about breastfeeding but I really was not prepared for how much my children would talk about, ask for, and fight over non-water drinks. Right now these are the main drinks of discussion in our household.

PRIME. Hugh (8) started mentioning PRIME about a year and a half ago, when he was in second grade. Every time we go to the grocery store now he says “Can I try PRIME?” and I always say no. I didn’t know what it was until I googled it — it’s an energy drink from a YouTube guy in a kind of metallic-y bottle? Can it taste good? He doesn’t know this but he’s getting a bottle in his Christmas stocking.

COKE. Coke seems cool still. Hugh has speech therapy each Sunday and at every session I allow him to have one (1) Coke Zero as a treat. This weekend when I took him to his eight-year-old checkup, the pediatrician asked him if he is eating healthy foods and he said, “Well. I drink a lot of Coke, and we’re going to Burger King after this.”

COFFEE. The coffee is Kevin’s and mine. I make cold brew at home and drink it out of a Contigo travel mug, the kind where you press a button on the side of the lid to make the coffee come out. (The model is the West Loop.) When you press the button a very tiny amount of coffee stays in the slurpy part of the lid. Eileen (4) has gotten super into drinking “the coffee from the cap” meaning she licks my coffee mug every morning. This week she and I both woke up very early all of the days (daylight savings time - her, sheer panic - me). I would do a small workout with her either playing or well let’s be real just eating a few pieces of morning Halloween candy near me and each time I put my coffee mug down she grabbed it to lick the cap. At a certain point this made me a lil snappy because if you’re not drinking alcohol this week there are just not that many treat drinks left for you.

WATER, BOTTLED. All the kids have Wirecutter’s recommended brand of water bottle (Takeya) but Alice had the nerve to ask for a HydroFlask for her 11th birthday this past week. “Specifically lavender or in a light color.” This was confusing to me because I thought based on seeing some teens on the street that Owala was the cool one for Cambridge and I said “Oh, do you not want an Owala?” and she said “Ugh.” Separately, Stanley does not really appear to be a thing for the teens of the People’s Republic. I really thought about buying her a Stanley and being like “This is the one you wanted, right?” when she opened it and then being like hahahahahah just kidding and giving her the one she wanted (and returning the Stanley obv), but it doesn’t feel like the time for pranks. The joke is on me anyway because all prestige water bottles cost like $75.

HOMEMADE SODA. Last year a parent brought homemade soda as snack for Hugh’s baseball practice. They carried it in a jug and gave it out in tiny paper cups, “Would you like some homemade soda?” Hugh’s verdict was “sour!”