You should choose your pediatrician carefully, for his job is to examine your baby, give it shots, weigh it, measure it—in short, to do everything except attend to the baby when it is actually sick. When the baby is sick, either you or your pediatrician will be on vacation. This is an immutable law of nature.

The best babysitters, of course, are the baby’s grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida at the earliest opportunity.

If no grandparents are available, you will have to rent a teenager. You don’t want a modern teenager, the kind that hangs around the video-game arcade smoking Marlboros and contracting herpes. No, you want an old-fashioned, responsible teenager, the kind who attends Our Lady of Maximum Discomfort High School and belongs to the 4-H Club and wants to be a nun. Even then you don’t want to take any chances. The first time she takes care of your baby, you should never actually leave the house. Drive your car until it’s out of sight, then sneak back and crouch in the basement, listening for signs of trouble. In later visits, as you gain confidence in the sitter, you should feel free to eat sandwiches in the basement, and maybe even listen to the radio quietly. After all, this is your night out!

Be sure to leave the babysitter a firstaid kit with tourniquet; the phone numbers of the pediatrician, the ambulance, the fire department, the police, the Poison Control Center, all your neighbors, the Mayo Clinic, all your relatives, the State Department, etc; and a note telling her where you are (“We’re in the basement”) and what to do in the event of an emergency (“Pound on the floor”).

One fun thing to do with a small baby while it’s lying around is to sing it the traditional baby songs, the ones your mother sang when you were a baby. The words sometimes seem strange to us now, because your mother learned them from her mother, who learned them from her mother, and so on back to medieval England, when most people had the intelligence of kelp. Here are three of my favorites:

LADYBUG

(Robert Frost)

Ladybug, Ladybug Fly away home

Your children are all burned

They look like charred Raisinets

(Tickle baby under chin.)

HEG-A-LEG MOLLY

(Anonymous)

Heg-a-leg Molly

Daddy’s got a bunting

Why do you sleep so soon?

Wet his bed

And he broke his head

And Myron has gone to Vermont.

(Hold baby up and laugh as if you have just said something immensely amusing.)

LAND OF 1,000 DANCES

(Cannibal and the Headhunters)

I said a na Na na na na Na na na na na na na na na na Na na na na

(Check baby’s diaper.)

OKLAHOMA BABY CHICKEN HAT

Grasp your baby firmly and place it on your head, stomach side down, then stride about the room, bouncing on the balls of your feet and clucking to the tune of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

HERE COMES THE BABY EATER

Place your baby on the carpet, face up, then crawl around on all fours and announce, “I’m so hungry! I could eat a baby!” Then crawl over and gobble up the baby, starting at the feet, and periodically raising your head and shouting, “Great baby! Delicious!” Babies love this game, but you don’t want to play it when other grown-ups are around, because they will try to take custody away from you.

ATTACK OF THE SPACE BABIES

Lie on your back on the floor and hold your baby over you, face down. Move the baby around in the manner of a hovering spacecraft while making various high-pitched science fiction noises such as “BOOOOOOOWEEEEEEEOOOOO.” Feign great fear as the baby attempts to land on the planet Earth. (NOTE: Wear protective clothing, as space babies often try to weaken the earth’s resistance by spitting up on it.)

First of all, get rid of your cat. Cats are scum. You’ve read newspaper stories about elderly widows who die and leave their entire estates to their pet cats, right? Well, your cat reads those stories too, and has spent most of its skulking, devious little life dreaming about inheriting all your money. You know where it goes when it disappears for hours at a time? Investment seminars, that’s where.

So if you bring a baby into the home, the cat will see the baby as a rival for your estate and will do anything to turn you against it. Many instances of so-called colic are really nothing more than a cat repeatedly sneaking into a baby’s room in the dead of night and jabbing the baby in the stomach.

Dogs, of course, would never do anything like that. They’re far too stupid to think of it. So you can keep your dog. In fact, many dogs come to love their masters’ babies, often carrying them around gently by the scruffs of their necks, licking them incessantly and refusing to let anybody—even the parents!—near the baby. It’s the cutest thing you ever saw, and it really cuts down on child-care costs. Of course, you have to weigh this against the fact that the child develops a tendency to shed and attack squirrels.

Baby albums are probably the single biggest cause of violent death in America today. The reason is that when people have their first baby, they record everything that happens. By the time these people have their second baby, they’re sick of albums. Oh, they try to slap something together, but it’s obvious that their hearts aren’t really in it.

So Byron grows up, seemingly normal on the outside, but knowing on the inside that he has this pathetic scrawny album while his brother’s looks like the Manhattan telephone directory, and eventually he runs amok in a dentist’s office with a Thompson submachine gun. So if you want to do a baby album, fine, go ahead, but have the common decency to notify the police first.

During the second six months, your baby will begin to start crawling around looking for hazards. It will start to become aware of the mysteries of language, perhaps even learning to understand simple phrases such as “No!” and “Spit that out!”

Physically, you’ll find your baby is getting hardier and more portable now, so that you can more easily take it to restaurants, although you still can’t go inside. By now baby should have gotten over early medical problems such as the colic; if not, you should see your pediatrician and get something you can use to kill yourself.

So all in all, you can look forward in the next six months to a period of change and growth, with a 60 percent chance of afternoon or evening thundershowers.