Lay the baby on the floor, face up. Announce that you are very hungry, and start nibbling at the baby’s toes, then its hands, and finally, with great gusto, its stomach. Every now and then, yell: “Great baby! Delicious!”

These games will teach your baby many meaningful lessons, the main one being that the world is full of deranged people.

The only other major problem you’ll have with your baby is feeding it solid foods. Many kinds of baby food are available, all of them disgusting. Basically, the baby-food industry takes things that no normal human being would ever dream of eating, such as squash, and grinds them into mush and puts them in little jars. Babies, of course, hate baby food; they would much prefer the kinds of things you eat, such as cheeseburgers and beer. If we fed babies normal food, they would be full-grown, productive adults in a matter of weeks. But this would destroy the baby-food industry.

As I noted earlier, babies do not take solid food through their mouths, which are generally occupied with other objects. Babies absorb solid food through their chins. You can save yourself a lot of frustrating effort if you smear the food directly on your baby’s chin, rather than putting it in the baby’s mouth and forcing the baby to expel it on to its chin, as so many uninformed parents do.

WARNING: This article contains the word “breast.” I checked with an editor, and he said I could say “breast” as long as I used it scientifically, rather than to arouse prurient interest. For example, I could say: “Two breasts plus two breasts equals four breasts”, but I could not say: “Hey, get a load of that breast.” Anyway, I just thought Id warn you in case you don’t want to read the word “breast.” The rest of the article is about raising babies, and it’s very informative, so for the benefit of those of you who want to read everything but the paragraph with “breast” in it, I’ll let you know when you’re about to come to it.

The most important thing to remember about raising your baby is that you must not take anyone’s advice, except, of course, mine. Many people, such as your parents, will try to advise you, but you must ignore them. If they knew so much about raising kids, they wouldn’t have screwed you up so badly.

Most people make babies out to be very complicated, but the truth is they have only three moods:

Mood One: Just about to cry. Mood Two: Crying. Mood Three: Just finished crying..lm-# Your job, as a parent, is to keep the baby in Mood Three as much as possible; this means you have to figure out why it’s crying. Here’S a tip: Babies never cry because their diapers are dirty. You change their diapers only to make yourself feel better. You could leave the same diaper on your baby for months and it would be perfectly happy, although considerably heavier and less pleasant to be around. So that leaves only two reasons your baby cries: It is hungry. Some other reason. If your baby is hungry, you should feed it.

WARNING: The next paragraph is the one with a breast in it. So you should either skip it or be prepared for some very explicit talk.

You can either bottle-feed or breast-feed your baby. Many noted health fanatics strongly recommend that you breast-feed your baby on the grounds that it is very good for the baby. This may be true, but the real advantage of breast-feeding is that only female persons can do it. This means you male persons do not have to get up at the insane hours babies like to get up at. At first you may feel guilty about this, and you’ll get up in the middle of the night to give the female person moral support. But after a while you’ll get so good at morally supporting her that you’ll be able to do it without even waking up. In the morning, when the female person is exhausted from lack of sleep, you can commiserate with her. You can say: “I know how you feel. This morally supporting is no bed of roses, either.” She’ll really appreciate hearing this.

If your baby doesn’t stop crying after you feed it, it is crying for some other reason. You can try handing it back and forth and saying: “What do you suppose is wrong?” This does no good whatsoever, but it is an old traditional ritual and it passes the time. You can also try making funny faces; this teaches the baby that its parents may be brain-damaged. Or you can give the baby educational toys. My wife bought our baby several dozen expensive educational toys, designed by experts to teach babies about colors and spatial relationships and other vital educational things. Our baby ignores them. He could not be less interested in spatial relationships. The only toy he really likes is an extremely tacky plastic Wonder Bread wrapper, which he stares at happily for long periods. I’m growing fond of it myself.

Many years ago, practically nobody in America had a weight problem, because almost everybody was an Indian, and all there was to eat was bison. The Indians had bison for breakfast, bison for lunch, and bison for supper. After a few thousand years of this, they mostly just picked at their food. Then along came the early white settlers. They didn’t have a weight problem either, because they were engaged in Westward Expansion, which consumes a great many calories. Also, the pioneers rarely got a chance to eat. Oh, they tried: they’d be crossing the Great Plains, and the wagon master would yell: “OK, everyone, let’s form the wagons into a circle for a snack.” But before they could even get out the plates, the Indians, desperate for nonbison food, would attack. If the pioneers had been more thoughtful, they could have carried extra snacks, but they brought only enough for themselves, so unfortunately they had to kill the vast majority of the Indians.

Next the pioneers built farms, and soon the country was covered with amber fields of grain. As a result, everybody almost starved to death, because what the hell are you going to do with grain? Eat it? You’d be better off with bison. Fortunately, the farmers were able to sell their grain to the Russians, who will eat anything. In exchange, the Russians gave the farmers money, which the farmers used to buy food. So now we have tons of food, only nobody does any actual work except the farmers. Everybody else sits around offices and eats, which is why today most Americans are overweight, some of them to the point where they tend to stall escalators.

To figure out whether you are overweight, determine your sex and locate your correct scientific weight on this table:

SEX CORRECT WEIGHT

Male 155 pounds

Female 115 pounds

Child 60 pounds

If you weigh more than you should, you can attempt to disguise it, but this rarely works. For example, I once worked in an office with an overweight woman. I can’t remember her name, but it was an overweight name, like Bertha, so I’ll call her that. Most of Bertha’s overweight was concentrated in her behind. She looked like a perfectly normal person who for some reason was carrying an ottoman under her dress. Bertha had read in some beauty magazine that if you have a big behind, you should stand in such a way that one arm dangles in front of it, blocking the view. So Bertha made it a point to always have one arm dangling down, even when she was carrying heavy financial ledgers. She looked like she had some kind of nerve disorder. People were always saying “What’s wrong with your arm, Bertha?” until finally it became blatantly obvious that she was trying to obscure her behind, which her arm was too small to do anyway unless she put on a catcher’s mitt.

Another popular way to disguise excess weight is to wear clothing with vertical stripes. The idea is that vertical stripes create an optical illusion that makes you look thinner, but the truth is that they create an optical illusion that makes you look as though you were wearing a cafe awning. Also, every schoolchild knows that the only reason people wear vertical stripes is to disguise excess weight. You might just as well wear a big sign that says “FAT.” What I’m driving at is that you can’t really hide your weight problem, which means that sooner or later you have to go on a diet.