Dave Barry, 36, has a son, Robert, who began as a baby and successfully reached the age of 3 without becoming an ax murderer or anything, as far as anybody knows.

In addition, Mr. Barry has spent a number of hours thinking about babies, and has observed them in other people’s cars at traffic lights. He also owns a dog, and at the age of 15 completed much of the course required to obtain a Red Cross Senior Lifesaving Badge.

Getting pregnant is an extremely major thing to do, especially for the woman, because she has to become huge and bloated and wear garments the size of cafe awnings. This is the woman’s job, and it is a tradition dating back thousands of years to a time when men were not available for having babies because they had to stand outside the cave night and day to fend off mastodons.

Of course, there is very little mastodon-fending to be done these days, but men still manage to keep themselves busy, what with buying tires and all. So it is still pretty much the traditional role of the woman to get pregnant and go through labor and have the baby and feed it and nurture it up until it is old enough to throw a football with reasonable accuracy.

In recent years, however, men have become more involved in childbirth and child-rearing as part of a federally mandated national trend. Under the terms of this trend, men are beginning to see that they can free themselves from the restrictions of their self-made macho prisons and allow themselves to show their emotions openly—to laugh, to cry, to love, to just generally behave like certified wimps. What this means to you males is that if you get a female pregnant, you are now expected to behave in an extremely sensitive manner and watch the baby come out. I will explain how to do this later.

My point here, young couples, is that baby-having is extremely serious business, and you probably don’t have the vaguest idea what you’re doing, as is evidenced by the fact that you’re reading a very sloppy and poorly researched book. So I think you should start off with the quiz below to test your knowledge of important baby facts.

1. HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU ESTIMATE THAT A BABY’S DIAPER MUST BE CHANGED BEFORE THE BABY BECOMES TOILET TRAINED?

a. One million billion jillion.

b. One skillion hillion drillion gazillion.

C. Many babies never become toilet trained.

2. WHAT IS THE MOST DISGUSTING THING YOU CAN IMAGINE THAT A BABY MIGHT DELIBERATELY PUT INTO ITS MOUTH?

a. A slime-covered slug.

b. A slime-covered slug that has just thrown up all over itself.

c. A slime-covered slug that has just thrown up all over itself because it has fallen into a vat of toxic sewage.

3. WHEN IS THE BEST TIME TO TAKE A BABY TO A NICE RESTAURANT?

a. During a fire.

b. On Easygoing Deaf People’s Night.

c. After the baby has graduated from medical school.

4. WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOUR TWO-MONTH-OLD BABY IS SCREAMING IN AN AIRPLANE AND REFUSES TO SHUT UP AND IS CLEARLY DISTURBING THE OTHER PASSENGERS?

A. Summon the stewardess and say: “Stewardess, whose baby is this?”

b. Summon the stewardess and say: “Stewardess, this baby is very interested in aviation. Please take it up and show it around the cockpit for the duration of the flight.”

c. Summon the stewardess and say: “Stewardess, please inform the captain that this infant has just handed me a note in which it threatens to continue crying unless it is taken to Havana immediately.”

HOW TO SCORE: Give yourself one point for each question you answered. If you scored three or higher, you are very serious about this, and you might as well go ahead and have a baby. If you scored two or lower, you either aren’t really interested in having a baby, or you have the I.Q. of a tree stump. In either case, you should read the section on birth control.

Those of you who are going to have babies should skip the sections on birth control, because they contain many sexually explicit terms, such as “rooster.” You can go directly to the section, “How Much Does It Cost to Have a Baby?”.

To understand the problems involved in birth control, let’s look at this quotation from the excellent 1962 medical reference work Where Do Babies Come From?, which I purchased from a nurse at a yard sale:

“The way the rooster gets his sperm inside the hen, to fertilize her egg, is very strange to us.”

The problem with this quotation, of course, is that it suggests we have given a great deal of thought to the question of how to get sperm inside a chicken. But it does bring up the basic issue in birth control, which is to avoid fertilization you somehow have to keep the male sperm away from the female egg. This is not easy, because men contain absurd quantities of sperm, produced by the same hormone that causes them to take league softball seriously.

The most effective method of birth control for males is the one where, just when the male and the female are about to engage in sex, the friends of the male burst out of the bushes and yell and jump up and down on the bumper and spray shaving cream all over the car. The problem is that this method is pretty much limited to teenage males. Another popular form of teenage birth control is the condom, which the male uses by placing it in his wallet and carrying it around for four years and pulling it out to show his friends in the Dairy Queen parking lot.

When I was a teenage male, it was very difficult to obtain condoms, because you had to buy them at the drugstore from the Condom Lady, who was about 65 and looked like your grandmother only more moral. She had a photographic memory so she knew exactly who you were, and as soon as you left the store, she would dial a special number that would connect her with a gigantic loudspeaker system so she could announce to your parents and your teachers and everybody in your church or synagogue and people on the street that you had just bought condoms. Now they sell condoms right out in the open on display racks, just like breath mints or something, and the Condom Lady has switched over to selling Penthouse magazine to middle-aged businessmen at the airport.

For older males, the most effective form of birth control is the vasectomy, which is a simple surgical procedure that can be done right in your doctor’s office. Notice I say your doctor’s office. I myself would insist on having it done at the Mayo Clinic surrounded by a team of several dozen crackerjack surgeons and leaders of all the world’s major religious groups. I don’t take any chances with so-called minor surgical procedures, because the last one I had was when the dentist took my wisdom teeth out, and subsequently I almost bled to death in the carpet department at Sears.

The way I understand it, what happens in a vasectomy is they tie some kind of medical knot in the male conduit so the sperm can’t get through. Of course, this leads to the obvious question, which is: Won’t the sperm back up? Will these poor pathetic males someday explode like water balloons, spewing sperm all over and possibly ruining an important sales presentation? I say the American Medical Association ought to get the hell off the golf course and answer this question before the public becomes needlessly alarmed.