My next piece about a recent live show Alpha Mom:

A few weeks ago my husband and I attended a live show for the first time in several months, that of singer/songwriter Andrew Bird whose performance nearly knocked us out of our shoes, our shoes that were bought on sale because we spent the rest of our money on a babysitter. And drinks at the bar that cost so much you would have thought we were buying a distillery. Now that we are parents the amount of work that goes into planning and saving up for a night out is so prohibitively complicated that sometimes I would rather stay home and yank my pinky finger out with a set of salad tongs.