Dave Barry: 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 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.

During the second six months, your baby will begin to start crawling around looking for hazards. It will start to become aware of the mysteries of language, perhaps even learning to understand simple phrases such as “No!” and “Spit that out!”

Physically, you’ll find your baby is getting hardier and more portable now, so that you can more easily take it to restaurants, although you still can’t go inside. By now baby should have gotten over early medical problems such as the colic; if not, you should see your pediatrician and get something you can use to kill yourself.

So all in all, you can look forward in the next six months to a period of change and growth, with a 60 percent chance of afternoon or evening thundershowers.

We’re using the term “food” loosely here. What we’re talking about are those nine zillion little jars on the supermarket shelf with the smiling baby on the label and names like “Prunes with Mixed Leeks.” Babies hate this stuff. Who wouldn’t? It looks like frog waste.

Babies are people, too; they want to eat what you want to eat. They want cheeseburgers and beer. If we simply fed them normal diets, they’d eat like crazy. They’d weigh 150 pounds at the end of the first year. This is exactly why we don’t feed them normal diets: The last thing we need is a lot of 150-pound people with no control over their bowel movements. We have enough trouble with the Congress.

The key thing is that you should not place the food in the baby’s mouth. At this stage, babies use their mouths exclusively for chewing horrible things that they find on the floor. The way they eat food is by absorbing it directly into their bloodstreams through their faces. So the most efficient way to feed a baby is to smear the food on its chin.

Unfortunately, many inexperienced parents insist on putting food into the baby’s mouth. They put in spoonful after spoonful of, say, beets, sincerely believing they are doing something constructive, when in fact the beets are merely going around the Baby Food-Return Loop which all humans are equipped with until the age of 18 months. After the parents finish “feeding” the baby, they remove the bib and clean up the area, at which point the baby starts to spew beets from its mouth under high pressure, like a miniature beet volcano, until its face is covered with beets, which it can then absorb.

The trick is to distract the baby with something even worse than what’s in its mouth. Next time you’re in a bus station rest room, scour the floor for something really disgusting that might appeal to a baby. Stick it in your freezer, so you can quickly defrost it in a microwave oven (allow about 40 seconds) and wave it enticingly in front of the baby until the baby spits out its horrible thing and lunges for yours.

Of course, as your baby catches on to your tricks, you’ll need new and different things to entice it with, which means you’ll have to spend a great deal of time on your hands and knees in bus station rest rooms. This is a perfectly normal part of being a responsible parent. Remember to say that when the police come.

By now you’re probably thinking how nice it would be to take a trip somewhere and stay in a place where there isn’t a hardened yellowish glaze consisting of bananas mixed with baby spit smeared on every surface below a height of two feet. Great idea! My wife and I took many trips with our son, Robert, when he was less than a year old, and we found them all to be surprisingly carefree experiences right up until approximately four hours after we left home, which is when his temperature would reach 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Often we didn’t even have to take his temperature, because we could see that his pacifier was melting.

Almost all babies contain a virus that activates itself automatically when the baby is 200 miles or more from its pediatrician. The first time this happened to Robert, we wound up in a pediatric clinic where the doctor got his degree from the University of Kuala Lumpur Medical School and Textile College. He said, “Baby very hot! Bad hot! Could have seezhah!” And we said, “Oh no! My God! Not seezhah!” Then we said, “What the hell is ‘seezhah’?” We were afraid it was some kind of horrible Asian disease. Then the doctor rolled his eyes back in his head and went, “Aaaarrgh,” and we said, “Oh! Seizure!”

The lesson to be learned from this is that when you travel with a baby, you must be prepared for emergencies. Let’s say you’re planning a trip to the seashore. Besides baby’s usual food, formula, bottles, sterilizer, medicine, clothing, diapers, reams of moist towelettes, ointments, lotions, powders, pacifier, toys, portable crib, blankets, rectal thermometer, car seat, stroller, backpack, playpen, and walker, don’t forget to take:

• One of those things that look like miniature turkey basters that you use to clear out babies’ noses, for when your baby develops a major travel cold and sounds like a little cauldron of mucus gurgling away in the motel room six feet away from you all night long.

• A potent infant-formula anti-cholera drug, for when you’re lying on the beach and look up to discover that baby has become intimately involved with an enormous buried dog dropping.

• Something to read while you’re sitting in the emergency ward waiting room.

• Plenty of film, so you can record these and the many other hilarious adventures you’re bound to have traveling with a baby. You might also take a camera.

First, you should notify the airline in advance that you will be traveling with an infant, so they can use their computers to assign you a seat where your baby will be in a position to knock a Bloody Mary into the lap of a corporate executive on his way to make an important speech. Also, you should be aware that your baby will insist on standing up in your lap all the way through the flight, no matter how long it is. If you plan to fly with a baby to Japan, all I can say is you’d better have thighs of steel.

Some people try to get their babies to sit down on flights, by giving them sedatives. On our doctor’s suggestion, we tried this on a cross-country flight, and all it did was make Robert cranky. The only thing that cheered him up was to grab the hair of the man sitting in front of us, who tried to be nice about it, but if you have a nine-month-old child with a melted Hershey bar all over his pudgy little fingers grabbing your hair all the way from sea to shining sea, you’d start to get a little cranky yourself. So I think it might be a good idea if, on flights featuring babies, the airline distributed sedatives to all the adults, except maybe the pilot.