Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only 9 Months, with Tools You Probably Have Around the Home

Baby’s Development during the First Six Months

The first six months is a time of incredibly rapid development for your baby. It will learn to smile, to lift its head, to sit, to play the cello, and to repair automatic transmissions.

Ha ha. Just kidding here, poking a little fun at new parents who watch like hawks for their babies to pass the Major Milestones of Infant Development, when the truth is that during the first six months, babies mainly just lie around and poop. They haven’t even developed brains at this point. If you were to open up a baby’s head—and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should—you would find nothing but an enormous drool gland.

Nevertheless, this is definitely the time to buy your baby its first computer. It’s never too soon to start learning about computers, as you know if you have been watching those television commercials wherein children whose parents didn’t buy them computers at an early age wind up as rag-pickers with open sores all over their bodies.

Computers are the way of the future. You can buy them at K-Mart, for God’s sake. You see families wandering through the computer department, clutching K-Mart purchases such as huge bags of caramel popcorn manufactured in Korea, and they’re saying things like, “I think we should get this computer, because it has a built-in modem and the software support is better.” These are not nuclear physicists talking this way; these are K-Mart shoppers, and if they know about computers, your kid damn well better know about them, too.

What kind of computer is best for a baby aged 0 to 6 months? There are many models, ranging widely in memory size, telecommunications facilities, and expansion capabilities, but the critical thing is that your baby’s computer should be red, and it should have no sharp edges. Also, you should immediately cut off the plug, because otherwise your baby could receive a dangerous electrical shock from drooling on the keyboard.

Disciplining a New Baby

During the 1950s and 60s, parents were told to be permissive with their children, and the result was juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, Watergate, Pac-Man, California, etc. So we experts now feel you should start disciplining your baby immediately after birth. At random intervals throughout the day, you should stride up to your baby and say, in a strict voice, “There will be no slumber party for you tonight, young lady.”

You may think this is a waste of time, but scientists have determined that babies as young as three days old can tell, just from the tone of an adult’s voice, when they are being told they can’t go to a slumber party. You should keep up this tough discipline until your child is in junior high school and thus has access to weapons.

Baby-Tending for Men

During the first six months, your baby will need more care than at any other time in its life except the following 30 months. We modern sensitive husbands realize that it’s very unfair to place the entire child-care burden on our wives, so many of us are starting to assume maybe three percent of it. Even this is probably too much. I know I’ll be accused of being sexist for saying this, but the typical man has had his nurturing instincts obliterated by watching professional football, and consequently he has no concept of how to tend a baby. He feels he’s done a terrific job if the baby isn’t stolen by gypsies. You’d get better infant care from an affectionate dog.

But men keep reading articles in the newspaper Style section about how they’re supposed to help. So what happens is the family goes to, say, a picnic, and on the way the man, feeling magnanimous, says, “I’ll take care of the baby, honey. You just relax and enjoy yourself.” So they get to the picnic, and the husband, feeling very proud of himself, tends to the baby by poking it affectionately in the stomach every 45 minutes on his way to the cooler for a new beer. Between pokes the wife comes over maybe 35 times to change the baby’s diaper, feed it, cuddle it, arrange its blanket, put the pacifier back in its mouth, brush enormous stinging insects off it, etc.

On the way home, the man remarks on how easy the baby is to take care of, how it hardly cried at all, etc., and the woman plunges the red-hot car cigarette lighter deep into his right thigh. This is bad for a relationship.

So what I’ve done, men, is I’ve prepared a little automotive-style maintenance chart for you to follow when you’re in charge of the baby.

Men’s Baby-Maintenance Chart

MAINTENANCE INTERVAL ACTIVITY Every 5 minutes Lean over baby and state the following in a high-pitched voice: “Yes! We’re a happy boy or girl! Yes we are! Watcha watcha watcha!” Every 10 minutes Check all orifices for emerging solids and liquids; wipe and change containment garments as needed Every 30 minutes Attempt feeding and burping procedures Every 60 minutes Examine entire baby surface for signs of redness, flaking, major eye boogers, etc. Every 2 hours Call pediatrician about something

Advice to Women about Babies and Jobs

If you’re like many young mothers who held jobs before childbirth, you face a cruel dilemma: Your family could really use another income, yet you feel strongly that you should stay home for at least the first few critical years.

The solution to this dilemma is to have your baby get a job. Under federal law, it is now illegal for employers to discriminate against any person solely because that person is a baby. And to their surprise, many employers are finding that babies often make excellent employees, the kind who are always at their desks and never make personal telephone calls. In fact, one major corporation now shows all of its financial proposals to a team of handpicked babies: If they cry at a proposal, it is rejected out of hand; if they attempt to eat it, it is sent on to the board of directors.

What kind of job should you seek for your baby? Your best bet is the kind of job that even the most pathetic incompetent can handle:

State legislator

Vice president of anything

Paperweight

Consultant

Clerk in a state motor vehicle bureau

Anything in marketing

Choosing a Pediatrician

You should choose your pediatrician carefully, for his job is to examine your baby, give it shots, weigh it, measure it—in short, to do everything except attend to the baby when it is actually sick. When the baby is sick, either you or your pediatrician will be on vacation. This is an immutable law of nature.

Babysitters

The best babysitters, of course, are the baby’s grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida at the earliest opportunity.

If no grandparents are available, you will have to rent a teenager. You don’t want a modern teenager, the kind that hangs around the video-game arcade smoking Marlboros and contracting herpes. No, you want an old-fashioned, responsible teenager, the kind who attends Our Lady of Maximum Discomfort High School and belongs to the 4-H Club and wants to be a nun. Even then you don’t want to take any chances. The first time she takes care of your baby, you should never actually leave the house. Drive your car until it’s out of sight, then sneak back and crouch in the basement, listening for signs of trouble. In later visits, as you gain confidence in the sitter, you should feel free to eat sandwiches in the basement, and maybe even listen to the radio quietly. After all, this is your night out!

Safety Tip

Be sure to leave the babysitter a firstaid kit with tourniquet; the phone numbers of the pediatrician, the ambulance, the fire department, the police, the Poison Control Center, all your neighbors, the Mayo Clinic, all your relatives, the State Department, etc; and a note telling her where you are (“We’re in the basement”) and what to do in the event of an emergency (“Pound on the floor”).

Songs for New Babies

One fun thing to do with a small baby while it’s lying around is to sing it the traditional baby songs, the ones your mother sang when you were a baby. The words sometimes seem strange to us now, because your mother learned them from her mother, who learned them from her mother, and so on back to medieval England, when most people had the intelligence of kelp. Here are three of my favorites:

LADYBUG

(Robert Frost)

Ladybug, Ladybug Fly away home

Your children are all burned

They look like charred Raisinets

(Tickle baby under chin.)

HEG-A-LEG MOLLY

(Anonymous)

Heg-a-leg Molly

Daddy’s got a bunting

Why do you sleep so soon?

Wet his bed

And he broke his head

And Myron has gone to Vermont.

(Hold baby up and laugh as if you have just said something immensely amusing.)

LAND OF 1,000 DANCES

(Cannibal and the Headhunters)

I said a na Na na na na Na na na na na na na na na na Na na na na

(Check baby’s diaper.)

Three Traditional Baby Games

OKLAHOMA BABY CHICKEN HAT

Grasp your baby firmly and place it on your head, stomach side down, then stride about the room, bouncing on the balls of your feet and clucking to the tune of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

HERE COMES THE BABY EATER

Place your baby on the carpet, face up, then crawl around on all fours and announce, “I’m so hungry! I could eat a baby!” Then crawl over and gobble up the baby, starting at the feet, and periodically raising your head and shouting, “Great baby! Delicious!” Babies love this game, but you don’t want to play it when other grown-ups are around, because they will try to take custody away from you.

ATTACK OF THE SPACE BABIES

Lie on your back on the floor and hold your baby over you, face down. Move the baby around in the manner of a hovering spacecraft while making various high-pitched science fiction noises such as “BOOOOOOOWEEEEEEEOOOOO.” Feign great fear as the baby attempts to land on the planet Earth. (NOTE: Wear protective clothing, as space babies often try to weaken the earth’s resistance by spitting up on it.)

Babies and Pets

First of all, get rid of your cat. Cats are scum. You’ve read newspaper stories about elderly widows who die and leave their entire estates to their pet cats, right? Well, your cat reads those stories too, and has spent most of its skulking, devious little life dreaming about inheriting all your money. You know where it goes when it disappears for hours at a time? Investment seminars, that’s where.

So if you bring a baby into the home, the cat will see the baby as a rival for your estate and will do anything to turn you against it. Many instances of so-called colic are really nothing more than a cat repeatedly sneaking into a baby’s room in the dead of night and jabbing the baby in the stomach.

Dogs, of course, would never do anything like that. They’re far too stupid to think of it. So you can keep your dog. In fact, many dogs come to love their masters’ babies, often carrying them around gently by the scruffs of their necks, licking them incessantly and refusing to let anybody—even the parents!—near the baby. It’s the cutest thing you ever saw, and it really cuts down on child-care costs. Of course, you have to weigh this against the fact that the child develops a tendency to shed and attack squirrels.

Baby Albums

Baby albums are probably the single biggest cause of violent death in America today. The reason is that when people have their first baby, they record everything that happens. By the time these people have their second baby, they’re sick of albums. Oh, they try to slap something together, but it’s obvious that their hearts aren’t really in it.

So Byron grows up, seemingly normal on the outside, but knowing on the inside that he has this pathetic scrawny album while his brother’s looks like the Manhattan telephone directory, and eventually he runs amok in a dentist’s office with a Thompson submachine gun. So if you want to do a baby album, fine, go ahead, but have the common decency to notify the police first.