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

You should also be sure to have the electrical system taken out. You cannot “childproof” it by plugging those little plastic caps into all the outlets. Children emerge from the womb knowing how to remove those caps by means of an instinctive outlet-cap-plucking reflex that doctors regard as one of the key indicators that the child is normal.

Baby’s room must be kept at a steady temperature of 72 degrees Fahrenheit and a relative humidity of 63 percent, and it must have wallpaper with clowns holding blue, red, and green balloons. Baby’s room should be close enough to your room so that you can hear baby cry, unless you want to get some sleep, in which case baby’s room should be in Peru.

The important thing to remember here is that baby does not sleep in the crib. Baby sleeps in the car. Baby uses the crib as a place to cry and go to the bathroom, so the crib has to be fully protected. To make up the crib, first put down the mattress, then a rubber pad, then a yellow rain slicker, then a stout canvas tarpaulin, then a shower curtain, then a two-inch-thick layer of road tar, then a bale of highly absorbent rags, then a cute little sheet with pictures of clowns holding blue, red, and green balloons. You should have lots of spares of all these things.

Your best bet is an industrial dumpster.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why so few high-level corporate executives are babies? The reason is that most babies do not dress for success.

Next time you’re in a shopping mall, take a look at what these unsuccessful babies are wearing. Somewhere on virtually every child’s outfit will be embroidered either a barnyard animal or a cretin statement such as “Lil’ Angel.” Many of the babies will be wearing bib overalls, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that such garments reduce the wearer’s apparent I.Q. by as many as 65 points. Some of the girl babies will be wearing tights and petticoats that stick straight out horizontally in such a way as to reveal an enormous unsightly diaper bulge, causing them to look like miniature ballerinas with bladder disorders. Really young babies will be encased in fluffy pastel zip-up sacks with no place for the poop to get out, so that after a few hours in the mall they are no more than little pastel sacks of poop with babies’ heads sticking out.

You look at these babies, and you realize that they will never be considered for responsible positions until they learn to dress more sensibly. So when you’re shopping for clothes for your baby, stick to the time-tested dress-for-success classics—your pinstripes, your lightweight wool suits in blue or gray, stout brogans, etc. And don’t neglect the accessories! A baby sucking on a cheap pink plastic rattle is likely to be passed over at promotion time in favor of a baby sucking on a leather rattle with brass fittings.

Your friends and relatives will buy your baby lots and lots of cute dolls and stuffed animals, all of which you should throw in the trash compactor immediately. Sure, they look cute to you, but to the baby they appear to be the size of station wagons. So all night long, while you’re safe in your animal-free bedroom, your baby is lying there, surrounded by these gigantic creatures. Try to imagine sleeping with an eight-foot-high Raggedy Ann sitting just inches away, staring at you! Especially if you had no way of knowing whether Raggedy Anns were vicious! No wonder babies cry so much at night!

So you don’t want cute creatures with eyes. You also don’t want so-called educational toys that claim to teach “spatial relationships,” because the only spatial relationship newborn babies care about is whether they can fit things into their mouths. This means you want toys that will fit safely and comfortably in a baby’s mouth. The best way to select such toys is to try them out in your own mouth, bearing in mind that yours has eight times the volume of baby’s. When you go to the toy store, ask to see eight of each potential toy; if you can stuff them all comfortably in your mouth, you should buy one. Remind the salesclerk to sterilize the other seven, so as not to pass infectious diseases on to the next shopper. The clerk will appreciate this thoughtful reminder.

In a later chapter, I’ll talk about buying toys for your child when it has acquired the conceptual and manipulative skills necessary to break things.

At one time, back during the Korean War, most people rejected disposable diapers because they preferred the natural soft feel of cloth. Then it finally began to dawn on people that the natural soft feel of cloth begins to lose some of its charm when it has been pooped and peed on repeatedly.

So now everybody uses disposable diapers. Oh, I realize there are diaper services that come to your house and drop off clean cloth diapers and pick up the dirty ones, but even those diapers are now disposable. The instant the driver is out of sight of your house, he hurls the dirty diapers into the street and drives off briskly.

The only problem with disposable diapers is that they are starting to overflow the world’s refuse-disposal facilities; scientists now predict that if the present trend continues, by the year 1997 the entire planet will smell like the men’s room in a bar frequented by motorcycle gangs. But this is not really as serious as it sounds, because, scientists also believe that several years before 1997 the polar ice caps are going to melt. Also, we could always have a nuclear war. So I would definitely go with the disposable diapers.

Before you have your baby, you’re going to be dealing with a number of professional childbirth experts, so you ought to know that they all have this very strict rule: when they talk about childbirth, they never use the word “pain.” Granted, this is like talking about the Pacific Ocean without using the word “water,” but the way they see it, if they were to tell you women, in clear language, what is really involved in getting this largish object out of your body, none of you would have babies, and the professional childbirth experts would have to find another source of income.

So they use the International Childbirth Professional Code Word for pain, which is “contraction.” To the nonexpert, a “contraction” sounds like, at worst, maybe a mild muscle cramp, but it actually describes a sensation similar to that of having professional football players smash their fists into your uterine wall. In a “strong contraction,” the players are also wearing skis.

It’s quite natural for you to be apprehensive about the pain of childbirth. I was terrified of it myself, until I did a little research and learned there was no way I would ever have to go through it. So let’s take a thorough, informed, scientific look at this much-misunderstood topic, and maybe we can clear up your concerns, although I doubt it.

Here are two actual diagrams, drawn with the aid of modern medical expertise, showing the insides of a woman just before and just after giving birth. What these diagrams reveal to those of us trained to understand them is that there is an entire baby inside the pregnant woman, and somehow during childbirth it comes out. This is the part that stumps us, because despite all of our modern medical expertise, we frankly cannot see how such a thing is possible. All we really know about it is that it seems to hurt like crazy.