SYMPTOM CAUSE TREATMENT Baby is chewing contentedly Baby has found something horrible on floor Follow enticement procedure described on page 61

Baby is crying It could be teething, colic, snake bite, some kind of awful rare disease or something Don’t worry: most likely it’s nothing Baby has strange dark lines all over face and body Baby has gotten hold of laundry marking pen Wait for baby to grow new skin Baby’s voice sounds muffled Baby’s two-year-old sibling, jealous of all the attention the New Arrival is getting, has covered the New Arrival with dirt Vacuum baby quickly; explain to sibling that you love him or her just as much as baby, but you will kill him or her if he or she ever does that again

Your baby will learn to walk and talk, but that’s nothing. The major development is that your baby will learn how to scream for no good reason in shopping malls.

First of all, forget about reason. You can’t reason with a one-year-old. In fact, reasoning with children of any age has been greatly overrated. There is no documented case of any child being successfully reasoned with before the second year of graduate school.

Also you can’t hit a one-year-old. It will just cry harder, and women the age of your mother will walk right up and whap you with their handbags. So what do you do when your child decides to scream in public? Here are several practical, time-tested techniques:

Explain your side to the other shoppers. As they go by, pull them aside, show them the pizza crust, and talk it over with them, adult to adult (“Look! The little cretin wants to eat this! Ha ha! Isn’t that CRAZY?”).

Threaten to take your child to see Santa Claus if it doesn’t shut up. All children are born with an instinctive terror of Santa Claus.

Let your child have the damn pizza crust. I mean, there’s always a chance the previous owner wasn’t diseased. It could have been a clergyman or something.

Most babies learn to walk at about 12 months, although nobody has ever figured out why they bother, because for the next 12 months all they do is stagger off in random directions until they trip over dust molecules and fall on their butts. You cannot catch them before they fall. They fall so quickly that the naked adult eye cannot even see them. This is why diapers are made so thick.

During this phase, your job, as parent, is to trail along behind your child everywhere, holding your arms out in the Standard Toddler-Following Posture made popular by Boris Karloff in the excellent parent-education film The Mummy, only with a degree of hunch approaching that of Neanderthal Man, so you’ll be able to pick your child up quickly after it falls, because the longer it stays on the ground the more likely it is to find something to put in its mouth.

There are two distinct phases in the baby’s language development. The second phase is when the baby actually starts talking, which is at about 18

months. The first phase is when the parents imagine that the baby is talking, which is somewhere around 12 months, or even earlier if it’s their first baby.

What happens is that one day the baby is holding a little plastic car, trying to get it all the way into his mouth, and he makes some typical random baby sound such as “gawanoo,” and the parents, their brains softened from inhaling Johnson’s Baby Oil fumes, say to each other: “Did you hear that? Teddy said ‘car’!!!!!” If you’ve ever been around young parents going through this kind of self-delusion, you know how deranged they can get:

YOU: So! How’s little Jason?

PARENT: Talking up a storm! Listen!

JASON: Poomwah arrrr grah.

PARENT: Isn’t that incredible!

YOU: Ah. Yes. Hmmm.

PARENT: I mean, 13 months old, and already he’s concerned about restrictions on imported steel!

YOU: Ah.

JASON: Brrrrroooooooooooooooooper.

PARENT: No, Jason, I believe that was during the Kennedy administration.

Eventually, your child will start to learn some real words, which means you’ll finally find out what he’s thinking. Not much, as it turns out. The first words our son, Robert, said were “dog” and “hot,” and after that he didn’t seem the least bit interested in learning any more. For the longest time, our conversations went like this:

ME: Look, Robert. See the birds?

ROBERT: Dog.

ME: No, Robert. Those are birds.

ROBERT: Dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog.

ME: Those are birds, Robert. Can you say “bird?”

ROBERT (emphatically): Dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog.

ME (giving up): Okay. Those are dogs.

ROBERT: Hot.

Sometimes we’d think we were making real progress on the language front. I remember once my wife called me into the living room, all excited. “Watch this,” she said. “Robert, where’s your head?” And by God, Robert pointed to his head. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe what a genius we had on our hands. Then my wife, bursting with pride, said, “Now watch this. Robert, where’s your foot?” Robert flashed us a brilliant smile of comprehension, pointed to his head, and said, “dog.”

The trouble with books for small children is that they all have titles like, Ted the Raccoon Visits a Condiments Factory and are so boring that you doze off after two or three pages and run the risk that your child will slide off your lap and sustain a head injury. So what you want to do is get a book that has more appeal for adults, such as, Passionate Teenage Periodontal Assistants, then cut out the pages and paste them over the words in your child’s book. This way you can maintain your interest while the child looks at the pictures:

YOU (pretending to read out loud): “My, my,” said Ted the Raccoon. “These pickles taste good!” Just look at all those pickles, Johnny! (While Johnny looks at the pickles, you read: “Brad looked up from U.S. News and World Report as a blond, full-breasted periodontal assistant swayed into the waiting room on shapely, nylon-sheathed legs. ‘My name is Desiree,’she breathed through luscious, pouting lips, ‘and if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you how to operate the Water Pik oral hygiene appliance.’”)