Today was a rough day with baby.
It started out okay. I opened up his drawer/bed and went to get his lazy ass up, but he was all wrapped up in a blanket and kind of bluish. I took him out and he coughed and started crying. This thing almost got killed by a blanket. What a puss.
Feeding him wasn’t a lot of fun either. He didn’t know how to use a spoon, which I sort of expected, but he doesn’t even know what’s food and what’s not. And he doesn’t know what to do with it either. We tried a couple arrangements, then I laid him on the floor, stuck a funnel in his mouth, and poured in a can of chicken soup. The kind with stars, because he’s a baby. Then I left the room and when I came back it was gone. There, easy enough. That’s part of why I think it’s important to keep a baby blog. I think it’s good for parents like us to share tips.
After that I decided it was time to give him a name. I took him to Borders to look at baby name books. But instead I read comics. What was nice is you can pull them off the shelf and stick the baby’s little arm in the space where the book was. That way you can be sure and put it back in the right place. These libraries and bookstores should just get a stack of baby arms so everyone can do this without hauling a baby around.
After looking at not one of the baby books, I decided on Dum-Dum. It was a good enough name for a delicious treat, so it was good enough for him. Second place name was Greg, but there was this kid in high school named Greg who was kind of an asshole, so that name’s ruined for me forever.
It was hard to decide where to go after that. A baby is like having a retarded friend who you can carry around, but doesn’t help you out at all. He didn’t have one idea about where to go. I don’t think he had an idea in his tiny reptile brain all day, to be honest. His head just sort of rolled around, and he spent a lot of time looking straight at the sun. I was worried he might go blind, but how would you even know? You can’t have him read an eye chart. He can’t read. And he can’t even look at a thing that you’re trying to get him to look at. So I guess we’ll worry about his vision later.
Since Dum-Dum wouldn’t decide, I decided to take him to Babys R’ Us because maybe there would be some good stuff there. Let me be the frist to tell you that this store is total bullshit. I thought it was going to be like Toys R’ Us except baby-themed, so there’s be a GI Joe with a pacifier and maybe they’d be called Lil’ Joes or something. Or maybe like a Ninja Turtle with a diaper. But no.
All the toys there suck. They’re all just…shapes of shit. And they’re really bright, like the kinds of colors that only come from a fucking psycho clown’s warped imagination after he’s coming down from taking adderall for too many days in a row to work on his juggling.
Even worse than the toys, half the store is clothes. Overalls for babies and shit. Or stuff like these big dumb chairs that you put in the car for the baby, like this throne he can lay down in. How does that make any sense? Your baby lays on the floor all day, but all of a sudden he gets in the car and has to be carried in this weird chariot. I bet you four million bucks that the baby don’t know the difference between house carpet and car carpet. Make it five million.
I did buy this big wall cling set. It was Mickey and Goofy. But when we got home I made some alterations. I cut a swastika out of the Mickey’s chest and put it on one wall. Then I cut a Twix logo out of the Goofy and put it on the opposite wall. Then I sat the baby in the middle of the room and waited to see which one he would crawl to. Then I would know if this was an evil baby or just a regular. But after three or four hours I remembered that he didn’t crawl, so maybe he wasn’t just trying to trick me.
While I watched Dum-Dum stare up at the lights in a continued effort to ruin his vision forever, I thought about how sometimes it’s hard being a single dad. Maybe what I needed was some companionship, someone to be an equal partner and do absolutely all the baby stuff for me so quickly and quietly that I sort of forgot there was even a baby in the house. Which I did now, except then the baby would make a noise and it all came rushing back.
Maybe tomorrow, dear blog readers. Tomorrow, Dum-Dum gets a mommy.