How Not to Kill Your Baby Read online

  Trust me—she’ll love it! Also, try following her into the toilet sometimes, because this technique works great if she’s constipated, too!

  Sleep

  Experts advise that babies should be sleeping through the night by the age of three months. Experts also define “sleeping through the night” as sleeping for a single five-hour stretch sometime after dark.

  If your baby is not reaching this milestone, you may want to try giving your baby a light snack before bedtime. (Experts define “a light snack” as an uninterrupted eighteen-hour feed.) You might also try switching to a slightly cozier crib. (Experts define “a slightly cozier crib” as a custom-built, form-fitted baby chamber composed of sustainably sourced hardwood shaped to be precisely 1.3 inches away from the surface of your baby’s skin at every point.)

  The Wibberleys finally found a use for all those books by sleep experts.

  Keeping Good Records

  It’s essential that you keep careful track of your baby’s every bodily function. That way, when she is president of the United States, and a paranoid-minded conspiracy movement springs up denying her eligibility for the position, you will have documentary proof that she did, in fact, poop on U.S. soil at 8:23 a.m. on February 23.

  Here is what a simple record of your baby’s day might look like:

  Returning to Work

  For many women, returning to work is nearly as difficult a transition as becoming a mother—an endless series of missed moments that can never be recovered, all the while balancing the mutually exclusive roles of nurturing, ever-present life giver and career-minded twenty-first-century feminist. Many men also find it difficult, because they have to spend a few extra minutes dabbing spit-up off their suits.

  Here are some tips to make the transition easier:

  • Simulate the parenting experience by working for a boss who yells at you constantly, changes his mind every few minutes, and expects you to clean up his messes.

  • Take a job that allows you to work at night, then spend all day with your baby. (This will require outsourcing your sleep needs to an inexpensive nap surrogate in India.)

  • Consider taking your baby to work with you. If this is against company policy, dress him up in a suit and tie and tell everybody that he is “Ernesto Grzbclik,” a very short new hire from a country whose language consists of extended crying.

  Betsy’s plan backfired when Joey got promoted to a management position, then put her on probation for “insufficient Pixie Stick purchases.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Months Six Through Twelve, Unless You Have Already Killed Your Baby, in Which Case You Can Stop Reading Now

  The first six months can feel like an endless marathon, so congratulations! You’ve made it halfway through your baby’s first year. Just twenty and a half years left to go!1

  First Words

  On the average, children speak their first word sometime around their first birthday. If you don’t want your child to be average, therefore, you’ll need to start teaching him to talk at roughly six months. Here are some techniques you might use:

  ____________

  1 Assumingtheydon’tmajorinEnglishandmovebackinwithyouaftercollege.

  • Never speak to your baby. Eventually, the extended conversational pause will be so awkward, he’ll feel compelled to break the silence.

  • Alternatively, read to your baby every day, twenty-four hours a day. Pause only to point to people who aren’t reading and say, “See that jerk? He’s not reading. What a loser!”

  • Fill your baby’s mouth full of marbles, which you vaguely remember was kind of like something some famous Greek once did or something. (Note: To avoid choking hazard, marbles should be bowling-ball-sized.)

  • Learn ventriloquism.

  Baby Sign language

  Control over the fine muscles of the mouth and larynx is more complicated than control over fingers and hands, and develops much later. As a result, even children who cannot yet speak are able to communicate using sign language.

  Teaching your child sign language has several advantages. It allows them to express themselves at a young age, helping to prevent tantrums. It lets them develop the mental skills that will ultimately make spoken language possible. It offers a vital safety precaution in case they are pursued by kidnappers and the only police officers around are deaf. But, most important, it allows you to win.

  Words spoken by sign language still count as words, which means your child’s first words can come that much earlier than everybody else’s. (Unfortunately, scientists have not yet developed sign potty training, but they’re working on it.)

  Maggie learned all her baby signs from watching MondayNightFootball.

  THE THRILL OF VICTORY, THE AGONY OF NOT HAVING ANY TEETH AFTER A WHOLE YEAR OF CHECKING THOSE LITTLE PINK GUMS

  M any baby books offer lists of milestones that babies might reach at a given age. We have resisted the urge to do so, because all babies develop differently. What is important is not whether your child has grown his first tooth at five months old or said his first word at eight months. What is important is that he is doing those things faster than other children, because that means you win.

  Some books will urge you not to feel like your child is competing with other children. Those books are written by losers.

  Other books will acknowledge that competitive feelings are inevitable, but they will counsel you not to let those feelings drive your approach to parenting; you must not (they will continue) pressure your children to progress faster than their natural pace. These books are not written by losers. They are written by clever people who want your children to lose, because that means less competition for their own children.

  Rest assured: All books in the How Not to Kill Your Baby™ series are written by people who not only don’t have children, but have never actually interacted with them. How Not to Kill Your Baby™: a name you can trust!

  Translating Baby’s First Words

  Hearing your baby’s first halting speech will be a deeply emotional moment; no matter how much you feel you have learned about them during their short time on Earth, their first words will give you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to discover something new and horrible about them.

  First Steps

  Most children take their first steps at around twelve months of age, but some begin walking as early as nine months. As a precaution, starting around six months, your baby should begin wearing a helmet twenty-four hours a day.

  Minimum protection for a walking-age baby

  Best protection

  Sleep-Training Techniques

  If your baby is still not sleeping through the night by the time she is six months old, you may need to try sleep training by one of the following methods.

  • Crying it out involves putting your baby in his crib, closing the nursery door, and not opening it until morning. When you do return, you will either have a happy and self-confident baby who has learned to sleep through the night or a psychologically damaged future terrorist who will never sleep again. (On the plus side, a nocturnal schedule is a significant career advantage for terrorists, so your baby benefits either way.)

  When the Gundersons finally worked out a way to get Henry to sleep, it involved gravity boots and a tight grip.

  • Ferberizing is a variation on crying it out, but parents return to the room at steadily growing intervals to reassure the baby. Although it can take longer to work than crying it out, Ferberizing is less stressful for parent and child, and when it goes seriously wrong, at least it produces terrorists who call home on the way to the airport.

  • Co-sleeping is the practice of bringing your baby into bed with you. The advantage is that babies sleep better when they have a larger family member to snuggle up with. The disadvantage is that parents frequently sleep much more poorly, but this can be remedied by making sure that both parents have even larger family members to snuggle up to, such as a morbidly obese uncle.

  At some p
oint, your children will need to be weaned off co-sleeping. This is most commonly done by sending them off to college, where they can begin co-sleeping with people their own age.

  THE FIVE STAGES OF SLEEP DEPRIVATION

  Experts have identified five stages of sleep deprivation in parents:

  Stage 1: Although it would not be apparent to a casual observer, you are operating at slightly less than peak efficiency.

  Stage 2: You stumble over words and appear bleary-eyed.

  Stage 3: It is unsafe for you to operate a motor vehicle.

  Stage 4: It is unsafe for you to operate an electric toothbrush.

  Stage 5: It is unsafe for your child to visit The Hague, because the level of sleep deprivation he has subjected you to will result in prosecution under the Geneva Conventions.

  Occasionally, you will encounter other parents who will assure you that you will never again get enough sleep. They will chuckle and look proud of themselves, as if they’ve just said something funny. These are people who once progressed to the legendary Stage 6, spoken about only in terrified whispers, and it has permanently damaged their brains. Rest assured: One day, you will get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

  Then you will wake up to discover the entire nursery was carried away in a flood.

  DAN’S TIPS FOR DADS

  Guys, if your wife has suggested co-sleeping, I know exactly what your reaction was! You gave a long speech about how important it was to promote independent sleep habits but inside you were thinking “OH NO, PLEASE GOD I WOULD ONE DAY LIKE TO HAVE SEX AGAIN!”

  Well, don’t worry, this is actually going to work out great. Just tell your wife you really value the “emotional connection” of “physical intimacy” and you’d hate to lose that “soul-to-soul contact.” (Try to keep a straight face!) She’ll tell you not to worry, because co-sleeping advocates suggest having “intimacy” in places other than the bed.

  That’s right: Your wife just agreed to some hot and nasty kitchen table intimacy! Shut the curtains and roll up the rugs, cause you’re about to get intimate on the floor and you don’t want your knees getting burned! Get on Facebook and start looking up willing exes, because it’s time for some hot girl-on-girl intimacy! (That might be pushing your luck. But the kitchen table thing is still pretty boss!)

  Attachment Parenting

  Co-sleeping is an important part of a philosophy known as “attachment parenting.” Advocates of attachment parenting believe that the mother should breast-feed the baby on demand, carry the baby whenever possible, sleep with the baby, and respond immediately whenever the baby cries. If a mother must work outside of her home, attachment parenting proponents suggest that she simply carry her baby to work in an appropriate sling—a dignified pinstripe sling if she works on Wall Street; a lightweight silk sling if she is a paratrooper; or a bulletproof sling with built-in holster if she is a policewoman.

  Attachment parenting frequently involves “baby-led weaning,” which means that infants are breast-fed until they naturally lose interest in it, which tends to occur somewhere between two and seven years of age. If children have not developed an interest in solid food by that point, desperate measures are sometimes called for:

  Breakfast

  Lunch

  Dinner

  Some advocates of attachment parenting even forbid the use of teddy bears, security blankets, or other “luvvies,” because these “transitional objects” serve as substitutes for parental contact. These parents believe that nothing is more impor-tant than establishing a safe and trusting relationship with your child, even if you have to rip the security blanket out of their tiny trembling arms to do it.

  As always, our advice when weighing confiicting opinions is to carefully con-sider the arguments advanced by all sides, and then just take the most extreme position humanly possible. We therefore suggest that, rather than maintaining frequent physical contact with your baby, you never put him down, ever.

  An added advantage of surgically attaching your infant daughter’s skull to your own: You don’t need to worry about her abandoning you in your old age.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Toddler Years:

  From “No No No” to

  “NO NO NO NO NO NO!”

  Congratulations! You, and possibly your spouse and your child, have survived the first year. Your child is no longer a baby but a toddler—a word derived from the ancient Greek root todlos, meaning “No! I won’t! You can’t make me! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! NO NO! NO!”1

  ____________

  1 Ancient Greek was a remarkably compact language.

  Behavior Modifications

  There are countless methods of discipline, from positive reinforcement to carefully thought out punishments. Your toddler will use all of these techniques to mold you like warm putty.

  Disciplining Your Child

  The toddler years are a time for a child to test limits—in particular, the limits of your patience, the limits of your endurance, and the limits of your pocketbook. Toddlers need rules in much the same way they need expensive heirlooms: as something to shatter into a million pieces.

  Here are some techniques for steering your child away from destructive behavior and toward other, equally destructive behavior that you can at least feel you have a say in:

  • Offer your child choices. If you simply tell your child, “It’s time to get dressed,” she is likely to just say “No.” If, by contrast, you say, “Would you like to wear the red shirt or the blue shirt?” she will have to say “No” twice, providing her lungs with twice as much exercise.

  • Catch your child being good. Experts say that positive reinforcement is much more effective than negative reinforcement. Rather than say “Stop hitting Mommy’s vase with that hammer,” try saying, “Oooh! Look at all the things you didn’t hit with a hammer!” (Note: This only works if there is anything left in your house that has not been hit with a hammer.)

  It took eight months of around-the-clock surveillance, but at long last, Jenkins had finally caught his son being good.

  • Avoid situations that are likely to lead to a tantrum, such as staying inside, going outside, trying to put your child down to sleep before he is tired, waiting too long to put him down and letting him get overtired, speaking to him, not speaking to him, giving him too many toys, not giving him enough toys, or breathing.

  • Reward charts: Create a chart with a line for each day of the week. Every day that your child displays the desired behavior, put a sticker on the appropriate line. Then, when they’ve accumulated enough stickers, give them a reward, such as more stickers, which they can collect until they have enough to trade in for more stickers, which you can put on the chart to start the process again. Think of stickers as toddler crack, yourself as the pusher, and the reward chart as the pimpedout Mercedes in which you cruise their neighborhood.

  Elissa awoke from a twenty-four-hour good-behavior bender with an odd itchy feeling on her cheeks and forehead.

  • Distract your child before trouble starts. If you see your toddler heading for something breakable, distract him by breaking it yourself first. Nothing you can do can prevent your one-year-old from destroying a four-hundredyear- old porcelain vase, so you might as well have the fun of smashing it yourself.

  Bath Time

  A nice bath is the perfect way for your toddler to prepare for bedtime. As you watch her relaxing and splashing in warm, soothing water, you will feel yourself relaxing, too, as the stress of your own day fades away. Publishing technology currently prevents us from installing a siren in these pages, so we will simply say: WAKE UP! A child in a bath requires your complete attention at all times. Children can drown in as little as 1/10,000,000th of a millimeter of water in half the time it takes a hypercaffeinated hummingbird to flap a pair of spring-loaded wings.

  In fact, to be as safe as possible, we recommend you keep your child away from even microscopic moisture. The simplest way to do this is to add an ordinary indus
trial-strength dehumidifier to the plastic bubble in which you have already placed them. If, for some reason, you have chosen to let your children run free, you will need to hire a corps of highly trained moisture-removal technicians to follow them at all times, swooping in with an organic cotton towel the instant a bead of sweat appears on their brow.

  Even better, we recommend moving to Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest region on Earth, where entire millennia pass without a single drop of rain. As an added bonus, the lack of moisture is so extreme there that even the cyanobacteria that thrive in other deserts cannot survive, which means fewer runny noses.

  “No, Timmy, don’t touch that! Hidden under a cactus’s seemingly arid surface is a reservoir of toddler-killing water!”

  Toilet Training

  Toilet training doesn’t have to be stressful. It’s simply a battle of wills regarding the control of muscles located inside your child’s body, which takes place when he is at the most stubborn stage in human development, and which, if it goes wrong, will result in your kid growing up to be this guy: