How Not to Kill Your Baby Read online

  Fortunately, the trauma of toilet training can be greatly reduced, as long as you follow our simple tips exactly, and completely disregard any advice from anybody else.

  • Buy a high-tech potty that plays soothing classical music as soon as your child tinkles. This creates a positive feedback loop in your child’s mind, although it may result in their one day requiring adult diapers to attend a symphony orchestra performance.

  • When using words to describe your child’s private parts, speak casually, as if you were describing any other part of the body. Children can sense tension in your voice, and it may lead them to think of their genitals as being dirty or shameful. So, for God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t think about the fact that the slightest hint of tension in your inflection can irreparably damage your child’s mental health. In particular, don’t think about that photo on the last page of the guy who can’t pee unless he’s wearing a bull costume, because what probably happened was that his mom one time said “penis” while she was feeling a little stressed, and now the poor guy is so ashamed of his genitalia that he has to cover his entire body before he can urinate. If you’re worried you’re going to think about it, just repeat “Don’t think about bulls when you say ‘penis’” over and over and over again.

  • Some experts believe that modern diapers make toilet training more difficult, by being so absorbent that children do not experience the sensation of having wet themselves. Instead of diapers, wrap your toddler’s bottom in a single square of generic-brand toilet tissue, and then, just to be safe, squirt them repeatedly with a squirt gun.2

  ____________

  2 You may feel this contradicts our earlier comments regarding the deadly drowning possibilities inherent of even a single molecule of water. You are correct. Nobody ever said parenting was going to be easy.

  Pets

  A pet is a wonderful addition to your household if you wish to teach your child about compassion and loyalty, or if you feel you simply aren’t dealing with enough poop.

  Doctors used to warn that early exposure to pets could cause allergies. Newer evidence suggests that early exposure to pets may, in fact, prevent allergies. To be safe, we recommend that you own a pet and don’t own a pet, simultaneously. This is possible thanks to the new How Not to Kill Your Baby™ Saf-Tee Products Brand© Schrodinger’s Pet Cat in a Box, available in pet stores and nuclear physics laboratories near you.

  If you have an insurance policy that can be invalidated by the presence of quantum paradoxes inside your home, you will need to consider an alternative. Here are the pros and cons of several common pets.

  Pros: Gentle; easy to care for.

  Cons: Annual laying of chocolate-filled eggs increases risk of diabetes.

  Pros: Will remain ever faithful and patient.

  Cons: Won’t teach your child about the cruelty and fickleness of the world.

  Pros: Will remain ever faithful and patient, as long as you keep the food coming.

  Cons: Will eat entire family if you lose the can opener.

  Pros: Unusual choice may launch child on a lifetime of curiosity and scientific discovery.

  Cons: Unusual choice may launch child on a lifetime of being the kind of person who keeps a pet snake.

  Pros: Long-lived. Highly intelligent. Capable of stomping playground bullies into mush.

  Cons: None.

  CHAPTER 9

  Childhood’s Halcyon Days, and Other Terrors Beyond Imagining

  As your son or daughter leaves the toddler years behind and begins to enter childhood, a whole new set of challenges begins to present itself. It is an age when your kids worry about their own mortality, get bullied, lie to you, experience peer pressure, and require stitches, frequently all at once. On the other hand, in a few years, they’ll be teenagers, at which point they’ll be doing all those things while having sex. So relax and enjoy your final few years without grandchildren.

  Playdates

  Since your precious baby was born, you have successfully kept him away from the inferior, disease-filled offspring of other parents. Now, however, your child may begin to display an unfortunate interest in other human beings. You can postpone playdates for some time by convincing your son or daughter that other children are just animated films being projected on tiny fast-moving screens. Ultimately, though, one of them will hit, hug, or blow their nose on your child, and the jig will be up.

  Fortunately, playdates can be reasonably safe and only mildly unpleasant, providing you follow these tips:

  • To build your own child’s sense of self-esteem, slip the other child a fiver and tell him to take a dive at Chinese Checkers.1

  • Don’t just view playdates as a chance for your child’s social development. They also build your own character, by forcing you to talk to the other parents about sporting events or celebrities you have no real interest in.

  • To make sure that you and the other parents share the same values, have them fill out a playdate application.

  • Before agreeing to a playdate, don’t demand to see more than eight years of documented credit history from the other parents. There’s no need to be overcautious.

  ____________

  1 Then, to turn a profit on the morning, bet the other parent ten dollars that your child will win.

  Playdate Application

  Films

  As your child’s attention span lengthens and his ability to follow complex stories grows, he will finally reach a milestone you have long dreamed of: You’ll be able to plop him in front of a movie and leave him there for two hours.

  Be careful, though. Many seemingly harmless films can cause substantial psychological damage.

  Reading

  Books can activate your child’s imagination, touching him on the level of his most primal emotions as well as his most sophisticated thoughts. This makes them even more dangerous than movies.

  Decades later, Edna’s parents would wish they had never read her Harold and the Purple Crayon.

  Fortunately, How Not to Kill Your Baby™ Sayf-Tea Brand© Publishing offers a line of classic children’s books, carefully edited to remove anything that could stimulate your child’s dangerous sense of wonder.

  Sayf-Tea Brand© Peter Pan eliminates all references to flying, which might inspire children to jump out of windows. Instead, Peter Pan and the Darling children jump up and down on a mattress, after having a grownup remove it from the bed and place it safely on the floor.

  Sayf-Tea Brand© Charlotte’s Web is exactly the same as the original work until the very end, when Charlotte the Spider explains that she was only pretending to be dead, and then she joins Old Yeller, Bambi’s mother, and a fully intact Giving Tree in a heart-warming song called “Imagining Things Makes You Sad.”

  Sayf-Tea Brand© The Wizard of Oz consists of twenty-three nonfiction chapters about proper safety precautions during tornado season, followed by the words “And then Dorothy woke up, having learned a valuable lesson about proper safety precautions during tornado season.”

  Sayf-Tea Brand© Tom Sawyer and Sayf-Tea Brand© Huckleberry Finn don’t merely remove all racial epithets, as some of our competitors’ editions do. They remove race entirely, transferring the story to an all-white suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, in the present day. Don’t miss the classic scene where Tom Sawyer tricks his friends into updating his Facebook wall for him!

  Alice receives an important message from the Mentally Challenged Hatter.

  Nursery School

  Having tested the waters of human contact with a playdate, you may eventually need to send your child to school. This means exposing him not merely to germs but to the corrupting influence of other people’s opinions. Fortunately, there is one unmistakable bright side: Until your child is being graded on a regular basis, you cannot know for sure whether or not you are winning.

  When choosing a nursery school, make sure to visit first, and ask the teachers about their educational philosophies. Then ask about their criminal records. If t
hey insist they have none, you may need to keep asking, perhaps while shining a bright light in their face. Also, take their fingerprints, then follow them home from a discreet distance and go through their trash. Oh, and don’t forget to thank them for their dedication to helping the young!

  Once you have assured yourself that the teachers aren’t terrorists, baby eaters, or, God forbid, union members, it’s time to ask about the activities on offer. At the earliest age, “school” activities mostly consist of drawing with crayons and playing in the sandbox. You must therefore assure yourself that the school provides a carefully steam-sanitized sandbox, as well as crayon substitutes made out of corner-free, non-eyebrow-gouging cotton dipped in dyes squeezed from organic fruit. Be sure to do a further criminal background check on any on-site fruit squeezers.

  Of course, the attitude of the staff toward children is much more important than the quality of the crafts materials. Are all children praised equally for their efforts and encouraged to express their creativity for its own sake? If so, withdraw your child immediately and find a school where his work will be clearly identified as the best. Even better, try to find a school where other children are publicly ridiculed for not being as good as your son or daughter.

  Lastly, and most important, ask about results. Do graduates of this nursery school get into the kindergartens that get kids into the elementary schools that get kids into the middle schools that get kids into the high schools that get kids into the colleges that get kids into good medical schools? Because without a good medical school, recent graduates don’t get the kind of residencies that get them the high-paying positions that subsidize the comfortable pension accounts that pay for the luxury assisted living communities that feed into the prestigious nursing homes that have contacts at the top-rated hospices that can get you into the very best cemetery plots. And doesn’t your child deserve the best?

  Older Children

  “Childhood” is a broad term, covering everything from the fresh-out-of-toddlerhood four-year-old to the almost-a-teenager tween. Fortunately, it is easy to adjust your parenting techniques as your children grow: Simply do and say the exact same things, but raise your voice by one decibel for every year of your child’s age.

  AFTERWORD

  If you have made it this far, congratulations! You have successfully maneuvered your children through the open door that is birth and down the winding path of childhood, right into the road where they can be hit by the out-of-control gas truck that is adolescence.

  The risks and rewards of the teenage years are far too many and too complex for this book to go into. Instead, we recommend you purchase the companion volume, How Not to Kill Your Teenager Even If He Deserves It.

  Once your child has made it to adulthood, they will face just as many dangers, but now you will have absolutely no control over them, unless you have taken the sensible precaution of ridiculing them throughout their youth, leaving them without the self-confidence to fend for themselves, and forcing them to move in with you. Otherwise, here is a brief overview of their future. Good luck!

  FREE BONUS:

  Official How Not to Kill Your Baby™ Saqfe-Tqy Produqs© Baby-Proofing Kit

  Official how Not to Kill Your Baby™ Saqfe-Tqy© Power Decoys

  Cut out the following images and glue them on the walls throughout your home.

  As an added safety measure, glue the following images over all actual sockets:

  Official How Not to Kill Your Baby™ Saqfe-Tqy© Bath Thermometer

  Just clip and remove! Then hold above bathwater. If paper combusts, steam has been superheated to 451° Fahrenheit, and is probably not safe for baby. (Important note: Measurement of lower temperatures may require traditional thermometer.)

  END USER LICENSE: By purchasing, reading, and/or opening this book, you agree that you have read and will comply with all relevant safety warnings, and you agree to hold the author of this book, as well as his editor, agent, publisher, and dedicatees, entirely harmless in the case of any damage or loss, whether accidental or through negligence, even if they break into your house in the middle of the night and steal all your stuff. Furthermore, you acknowledge the contributions of the following people, and promise that on your next encounter with them, you will buy them a pint of beer or a cup of tea, or maybe some kind of crazy English boilermaker where you fill a cup with tea and then drop it into a beer mug. Most importantly, you recognize that anything that is offensive, inaccurate, or unfunny in this book is entirely the author’s fault, and, in fact, the people below probably tried to persuade him to delete it and nearly broke off their friendship when he refused.

  WARNING: At this point, the book stops being funny and starts being sincere to a possibly awkward degree.

  For reading an earlier draft and offering feedback, suggestions, and some of the funniest jokes in the book: Matthew David Brozik, Steven D’Ambrose, Larry Doyle, Teme Ring, Beth Schacter, and Sheryl Zohn. For Japanese translation services, Mayumi Negishi. For making the book look great, Diane Marsh and Julie Barnes. For their enthusiastic support and sound advice on this and many other projects: my agent, Robert Shepard, and my editor, Lane Butler. For enabling me to focus on my writing because I knew my daughter was in excellent hands, Lore.

  For demonstrating that great parents can retain a sense of humor about the whole thing, my mom and dad, to whom this book is dedicated.

  For her love and support in absolutely everything, my wife, Lauren. For being awesome, our children, Erin and Joseph.

  IMAGE CREDITS

  Note: All photos are posed photographs using models. Captions are for strictly humorous purposes and do not refiect any actual activities or characteristics of photo subjects.

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