Now let’s talk about maintaining your new baby.

This is the Basic Baby Mood Cycle, which all babies settle into once they get over being born:

MOOD ONE: Just about to cry

MOOD TWO: Crying

MOOD THREE: Just finished crying

Your major job is to keep your baby in Mood Three as much as possible. Here is the traditional way to do this. When the baby starts to cry, the two of you should pass it back and forth repeatedly and recite these words in unison: “Do you suppose he’s hungry? He can’t be hungry. He just ate. Maybe he needs to be burped. No, that’s not it. Maybe his diaper needs to be changed. No, it’s dry. What could be wrong? Do you think maybe he’s hungry?” And so on, until the baby can’t stand it any more and decides to go to sleep.

When your baby is awake and not crying, it will follow specific air molecules around the room with its eyes. For years, scientists thought the reason newborn babies waved their eyes around in such seemingly random ways was that they couldn’t really focus on anything, but we now know that, thanks to the fact that they have such small eyes, they can actually see molecules whooshing around, which is a much more interesting thing to watch than a bunch of parents and relatives waving stupid rattles in their faces.

Also, babies receive signals from outer space, bringing messages from other galaxies that only babies can detect. These messages cause the baby to smile (if the message is a joke) or look startled (if it is bad news, such as the explosion of a popular star).

During the day, you should feed your baby just before the phone rings. At night, you should feed your baby immediately after you have fallen asleep. After each feeding, you should pat your baby gently on the back until it pukes on your shoulder.

I’m surprised you even have to ask. All of us modern childbirth experts feel very strongly that you should breast-feed your child. There are two major reasons:

1. Your mother didn’t breast-feed, and as I pointed out in the chapter on childbirth, we now know that everything your mother did was wrong.

2. Breast-feeding is better for the baby. Much has been written on this subject, reams and reams of information in hundreds of excellent books and articles which I frankly have been unable to read because I would never get this book finished on time. But the basic idea, as I understand it, is that bottle milk is designed primarily for baby cows, whereas your baby is not a cow at all! It can’t even stand up! Am I getting too technical here?

Anyway, all your really smart, with-it trend-setters are into breast-feeding today. Go into any swank New York City night spot and you’ll see dozens of chic women such as Leona Helmsley breast-feeding, many of them with rented babies.

Like many new mothers, you may feel ashamed that you don’t just automatically know how to breast-feed. You know there must be more to it than just shoving the breast into the baby’s mouth, because otherwise people wouldn’t keep writing enormous books about it. But just what are you supposed to do? You look at pictures in National Geographic of women in some primitive South American jungle tribe, women who have never even seen Tupperware, casually breast-feeding their infants, and you think: “How come they know how to do it and I don’t? What’s wrong with me?”

Don’t be so hard on yourself. Those primitive women have undergone hours and hours of intensive breast-feeding instruction at special training centers funded by the United Nations, and only the top graduates are chosen to appear in National Geographic photographs. Yes, they have to be taught, too, so don’t be the least bit ashamed to ask a nurse for help. My wife finally had to ask a nurse, who came in and stuck her (my wife’s) breast into my son’s mouth. Without the nurse’s technical know-how, my wife might have stuck her breast into my son’s ear or something, and serious nutritional complications could have developed.

Well, for one thing, you’re supposed to switch the baby from one side to the other, but usually the baby wants to stay where it is, and babies develop suction that has been measured at upwards of 6,000 pounds per square inch. You can’t get them off with crowbars.

Another common problem is milk supply. Babies love to play little pranks wherein one day they drink about six gallons of milk, which causes a mother to produce like crazy, and the next day the baby drinks maybe an ounce and a half. Some mothers have been known to explode from the pressure.

Colic is when your baby cries all the time, and people keep telling you how their kid had the colic for 71 straight months. If your baby gets colic, you should take it to the pediatrician so he can say, “There’s nothing to worry about,” which is of course absolutely true from his perspective, since he lives in a colic-free home many miles from your baby.

“There’s nothing to worry about” is a typical example of the kind of easy-for-you-to-say remarks that pediatricians like to make. Another one is, “Take his temperature rectally every hour,” an instruction which, if actually followed, would scar both parent and child emotionally for life. If your baby has diaper rash, your pediatrician may say, “Just leave the diaper off for a while.” This would be a wonderful idea if the baby would stop shooting wastes out of its various orifices, but of course the baby cannot do this, which is why it is wearing a diaper in the first place. Not that the pediatrician knows about any of this. His baby is tended by domestics from third world nations.

First of all, you must understand that as far as your baby is concerned, you never have to change its diapers. There is no creature on earth so content as a baby with a full diaper. Pooping is one of the few useful skills that very small babies have mastered, and they take tremendous pride in it, especially when they have an audience, such as grandparents or the assembled guests at the christening. They’ll wrinkle their little faces up into determined frowns, and they’ll really work at it, with appropriate loudish grunting noises that will at times drown out the clergyman. After all that effort, they want some time to enjoy their achievement, to wriggle and squirm until poop has oozed into every wrinkle and crevice of the cute little $45

designer baby outfit you bought especially for the christening. So when you change your baby’s diaper, don’t think you’re doing your baby any great favor. As far as your baby is concerned, you’re taking away the fruits of its labor. “Why don’t you get your own poop?” is what newborn babies would say if they could talk, which thank God they can’t.

Now let’s talk about diaper-changing technique. The problem with most baby books is that when they show you how to change diapers, they use photographs showing a clean changing table in a well-lit room, and a baby that is devoid of any sign of bodily eliminations. Why would anybody, except maybe some kind of pervert, want to change such a baby? No, what you need to know is how to change a really filthy baby, and under difficult conditions, such as in bus station rest rooms where even the germs have diseases.

I’d say restaurants pose the biggest diaper-changing challenge. When my son was three months old, my wife and I took him to a dimly lit, semielegant restaurant, and by the time we examined him closely he had managed to get poop up as far as his hat. I mean, we had a major failure of the containment vessel, and there was no sterile little changing table around, just lots of people hoping to dine in a romantic environment. So what you have to do in these situations is go on laughing and chatting as though nothing is wrong, but meanwhile work away like madmen under the table with moist towelettes, which you should buy in freight-car loads.