The flu? Worse! Anthrax? Way worse!
No, this is a virus far more terrifying that hits much closer to home. It’s name: baby fever.
Everywhere I look, babies are popping up like bread from a toaster. My sister, co-workers, friends – it seems like everyone I know is suddenly plummeting into the dark abyss known as parenthood, the new mothers glowing beautifully, the new fathers walking around in a daze like someone just gave them a surprise root canal. And the fever is spreading faster than STDs on Kid Rock’s tour bus.
Pop! Oh no, there’s another baby!
Pop, pop! Oh man, sounds like twins!
Pop! Oh, whew! That one was just the sound of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime show.
My entire world is turning into a big game of Whack-a-mole. Only instead of moles, it’s babies, and instead of whacking them on a head with a mallet, you have to tickle their chins and say things like, “What a widdle bitty cutesy bootsy boo!” This can be a little uncomfortable for someone whose vocabulary doesn’t normally include words like “widdle” and “bootsy.” But spend more than five minutes in a room with a baby, and you’ll be talking that way, too. It’s a proven fact that, in the presence of babies, our IQs automatically regress to that of a monkey and/or President.
Friends who just a few months ago were capable of holding entire conversations about how people who drive Hummers should be fed to lions are now reduced to goofy-talk about who would win in a battle between the Power Rangers and the Powerpuff Girls. Which is so stupid, because the Powerpuff Girls’ ability to fly clearly gives them the advantage.
There are only a few things left in this world capable of snapping our poor friends out of their sleep-deprived stupor; by far the most exciting of these is when the baby “makes.” One whiff of baby doody, and our friends start doing cartwheels up the stairs like they just won the lottery, their eyes dilated in parental glee. “Oh, look! Baby made a poopsey-woopsey! Hurray for poopsey-woopsey” they holler, shoving the diaper up to my face. “Would you like to see the poopsey-woopsey?” No, I would not like to see the poopsey-woopsey.
We have entered baby mode, when even the most NASCAR-watching man develops a little lisp (pronounced “widdle wisp”) and addresses the baby in a falsetto squeal. “Apple” becomes “apple-wapple.” “Blanket” becomes “blankey-wankey.” “Beef jerky” becomes “Jeff, I can’t believe you just fed that to my baby!”
Now, I don’t really have a problem with the whole concept of having babies, provided that you keep them properly muzzled and caged. It’s just a little unsettling to think that my friends are the ones producing them. It’s like the first time you realize a teenage girl would find it officially icky if you started talking to her at a party; you always knew it was coming some day, but it’s still a kick in the old-man shins when it happens.
The fact is, these babies are multiplying faster than ignorance at a Toby Keith concert. I’ve been trying to resign myself to the fact that I’m entering a new phase of life, that inevitably my social events will involve not red wine, but red juice; not tailgating parties, but Teletubbies; not dinner and a movie, but karaoke singalongs to Disney DVDs while snacking on the Cheerios the baby spilled between the couch cushions.
My wife and I plan to have children ourselves in a few years, but I have some concerns I’d like to address first. Among them is the fact that my little Jack Russell puppy finds babies to be both chewable and delicious, second only to the cat’s litterbox on the doggy taste-scale. So obviously we can’t have a baby yet, because our dog might eat it, and that could make his tummy really upset.
A second concern is that my baby might not be cuter than my friends’ babies. There are those who argue that all babies are cute, and that you love them no matter what they look like. These people are lying, and probably have ugly babies. The truth is, having a baby is a real crap-shoot. As my wife and I have witnessed, even our most beautiful friends are capable of producing a baby that looks like Elmer Fudd sucking on a lemon and vinegar popsicle. (For any of my friends reading this, of course I’m talking about someone else’s baby. Yours is cute as a button. Wutton.)
So until science has invented a dog-proof, ugly-proof baby, I’ll do everything in my power to avoid this new and powerful strain of baby fever. Although babies can be awfully cute. And fun. And loveable. And ... oh, crap.
At first glance, it appeared that we were finally going to end up with a relatively normal set of neighbors, by which I mean people who won’t wake us up with loud porno movies at 3 a.m.
No Nazi flags in their windows, no pentagrams on their foreheads, no NRA stickers on their giant SUVs – there was nothing overtly evil, at least. My wife and I didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but we couldn’t help but hope that maybe, just maybe, these neighbors wouldn’t be the devil.
Yes, it was looking good. That is, until we were introduced to the new neighbors’ pets. They were those nasty little animals, those smelly and ugly ones with pointy little teeth and beady little eyes. What do you call them again? Oh yeah. Kids.
We watched in horror as they ran around our yard, drooling on their clothes, chasing our cats up the trees, and relieving themselves in our garden. There were hundreds of them. Short ones, tall ones, skinny ones, fat ones, all clumped together in a dark mass of dirty fingernails, skinned knees, and Cheerios breath. And they were multiplying by the minute.
In a matter of days, the children had worked their way into our lives like sand in your swimsuit. Look out your window in the morning – there’s a grubby little kid making a blowfish on the glass. Walk outside to get the newspaper – there’s some kid, vomiting up a nasty albeit colorful pile of Mike & Ikes right onto the sports section. Pour some cereal into your bowl – a kid comes tumbling out of the box, his cheeks stuffed with all of the orange stars, yellow moons, and green clovers.
You can’t even walk out to your car in the morning without seeing some dirty little kid with his finger up his nose peeking out from behind the front tire. Then you blink, and instantly three more children appear where the first one was, all three of them with a finger buried two knuckles deep into their nostril.
Blink – there’s five more, hanging upside down like possums from your exhaust pipe. Blink – there’s a dozen more, square-dancing on your hood.
Blink, blink – now they’re inside the car, giving you the middle finger and pressing their butt cheeks against the glass.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for children, provided that they’ve had their shots and are properly leashed. But had I known our neighbors would be so, uh, prolific, I would have invested in some more solid fencing.
The most challenging part of dealing with our neighbors’ several hundred children is the fact that I’m expected to act like a mature adult regardless of the situation. As my monthly columns attest, I have difficulty acting like an adult under normal circumstances, let alone when, say, a pair of snot-nosed 7-year-olds are trying to pee on my dog through the fence.
“Hey, guys” I say, trying my hardest not to pee back on them. “Waddya say you stop trying to pee on my dog? Huh? Wouldn’t that be nice? To not pee on my dog?”
“Arf, arf, arf!” says one of the children, subtly shifting his line of fire closer to my shoe.
"I have a penis!" yells the other, and sticks his tongue out at me.
“Yes, yes, I can see that,” I say. “How about not using it to pee on my dog?”
“Your belly’s fat, but your legs are skinny,” observes the first boy.
“I have a pee-ee-eenis!” yells the second boy.
"Oh yeah? Well, I have two!" I yell back. “Now get out of here before I call the police and they arrest you and break your toys and never let you see your parents again!”
The boys stare at me in disbelief for a moment before running into their house. I take a few seconds to enjoy my triumph before realizing that there’s just no way I could sound cool bragging to my friends that I totally scared the crap out of two 7-year-olds. Then I start thinking about the phone call I’ll be receiving from the police later that night. “You told them you had two what?”
Sure, maybe I was able to solve the problem of those two particular boys trying to pee on my particular dog, but what about the other few hundred kids? Lord only knows what they’ll try to pee on when I’m not looking.
I tried launching a counter-offensive. I hid just inside my door, armed with a secret weapon. I threw the cat outside as collateral damage and waited until the children gathered around it, holding knives and forks in their dirty little fists, their red eyes rolling around in their heads like marbles. That’s when I unleashed the dog. He plowed through the mass, tossing their little bodies in every direction. They scrambled out of the yard, but not before our brave little Jack Russel debriefed at least half a dozen of them. Tiny underoos were scattered across the lawn.
But it was, and remains, a losing battle. Even as I lie in bed at night thinking of ways to take the kids out, I can hear them scampering across my roof like fat squirrels with a sugar buzz. But I look at it this way: at least they’re not old enough to watch porn in the middle of the night.
