Now that it’s summer, it’s important to stay hydrated. It’s always important to stay hydrated, but it’s a lot easier during the winter, when, if you don’t want to dehydrate, all you have to do is come up with excuses not to move around. In the summer, you can dehydrate by sitting still, until you’re like those little peas they put in Tradition soups. And you can’t exactly rehydrate a person by pouring water on him and then laying a spoon on his yarmulke for three minutes.

So here are some tips for staying hydrated, based on my own personal life experience:

#1: Keep drinking.

But don’t drive. Cars are very hot, especially when you first get into them. They’re basically greenhouses that move around by burning fuel.

#2: Make sure your kids drink a lot too.

My kids do, I’m pretty sure, just based on the number of dirty cups sitting around my kitchen. They drink about half a cup, run away for some Lego-related emergency, and then come back and take a fresh cup.

#3: Wash lots of cups.

I wash, on average, about 500 cups a day, though I use the term “wash” very loosely, because it’s 500 cups a day. But it basically means that I spend a great deal of time standing in front of the sink, and even though I’m not drinking the water, I’m getting a whole lot of it on the front of my shirt. That’s got to count for something. It works for plants.

#4: Drink Water.

Water is probably the most hydrating of any drink, because it’s almost 100% water. At least this is what experts say, because otherwise no one would drink water. Water has no taste. And yes, there are people who talk about how a specific water tastes great. But at best, they’re saying that there’s nothing in it that makes it taste bad. It’s supposed to taste like nothing. Ideally, at least while drinking it, you don’t want to have to think about the taste of water. That’s like having to think about the smell of tissues.

#5: Drink other things too.

Water can get boring, and the last thing you want is to dehydrate because you’re bored.

For example, I’ve been drinking a lot of orange juice lately, and I’ll tell you why: No one else in my house will drink orange juice, apparently. Somebody’s got to drink it.

This should bother me, but it doesn’t. It just means I get to buy less orange juice, because what all these experts don’t tell you is that…

#6: The more you drink, the more you have to schlep into the house.

Drinks are heavy. So ideally, you want the kids to drink something you can make from tap water.

#7: Make your own drinks.

Lemonade, for example.

We used to make lemonade from tap water and a yellow-green powder whose primary ingredients were sugar and floor cleanser, but my wife at some point decided it had far too much sugar compared to the floor cleanser. Or something. So now we make lemonade the old-fashioned way—by stepping on lemons with our feet.

Okay, the slightly less old-fashioned way. We mix lemon juice, water and some sugar. So that’s three ingredients instead of two, the result being that the kids always fight about who has to do it.

#8: Talk about it as a family.

We sit down for a nice, peaceful family supper, which we’re supposed to eat together, because that teaches good family values such as discussing your day and asking people to please pass the lemonade, except that there’s no lemonade. No one brought a drink to the table. So most of the discussions—as far as the kids anyway—involve the ever-engaging topic of whose turn it is to make the lemonade, which is frankly a discussion they could have had well before supper. Like it’s a surprise to them every single night that there’s going to be supper. Each child insists that he or she was the last one to make it, so he or she can’t possibly do it now. And my wife and I have to sit there and listen to this, as a family, and I have no idea whose turn it is to make lemonade. I have plenty of other things going on in my brain, such as who—me or my wife—last cleaned the bathroom.

#9: Nitpick about this while everyone dies of thirst.

So I get up to make lemonade, and by the time I come back, the kids have already left the table, although they do come back for two minutes to finish the entire bottle of lemonade. Standing up. But at least making it gets me out of sitting there listening to them argue. That’s my wife’s problem. After all, this was her bright idea, and she doesn’t really care whether we drink lemonade, because she gets to sit there with her seltzer. And that’s a great idea, except for the seltzer part:

#10: Drink something that no one else drinks.

No one else in the family drinks seltzer, so my wife always has a drink. Plus frequent showers when the seltzers explode.

I’ve actually tried to like seltzer several times, and I just can’t. To me, seltzer has always been the drink of old people who keep up with the news. It’s like one step away from drinking borscht.

I don’t want to drink something that cleans up stains. I want to drink something that makes stains. (Not borscht.)

Sure, she encourages the kids to like seltzer. “Mix it with orange juice,” she says. “It’ll be like orange soda.” Which shows you how often she drinks orange soda. For your information, orange soda has nothing to do with oranges. It’s called orange soda because it’s orange. Is orange juice orange? I don’t think so.

Also, the kids don’t drink orange juice.

By Mordechai Schmutter

 Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia, The Jewish Press and Aish.com, among others. He also has five books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].