The Backbencher

Children: Genetically Programmed Robots Trying to Kill You

If you are currently trying to decide whether or not to have kids, there are some things I should tell you to help inform your decision. 

Children will try to kill you. If you are not up for the challenge, don't have them. But if you do, understand this: Babies are genetically programmed to try to end your life. The only reason any parent survives is that small children are as wildly ineffective at homicide as they are at just about everything. But they try.

Here's an example: Somewhere around 12 months of age, children go through a phase where they fixate on shoes. They have to touch your shoes, pick them up, and then move them all over the house. After that, all children go through a phase where they are infatuated with flashlights. They will find every flashlight you own, run down the batteries, and then hide them all.

What is happening - the shoes, the flashlights - is that your children are systematically trying to deprive you of each element of your earthquake survival kit.

Chances are that you will not be harmed by this, but it's not for lack of effort.

Some toy manufacturers have attempted to satiate toddlers' relentless appetite for flashlights by creating toy versions which automatically turn the light off after a few moments. Fools. Young children smell decoys like dogs smell fear.

The other day, when I was trying to sneak out of the house early to go to work without waking anyone up, I could not find my keys. I wanted to look for the keys in my bedroom without turning on the ceiling light and waking up my wife. So I needed a flashlight. Every single flashlight in the house was missing or out of batteries except one, the only one our toddler doesn't care about: A heavy green flashlight with googly eyes, the head of an alligator, and a body shaped like a hippopotamus. This was not helpful in keeping my wife asleep. When you activate the light, the jaws snap open, and the flashlight says, "CHOMP! CHOMP! CHOMP! MMMMM! YUM! YUM! YUM!"

In the meantime, I managed to nearly puncture my foot by walking on a die-cast metal spaceship. Then, while hopping around trying to my stiffle yelps of pain, I stumbled into a toy broom which taunted me with a perky, "It's fun to clean up!"

Of course, children are not limited to setting traps. They will also try to injure you in more direct ways, such as by beating you with a whiffle bat or lowering their head and running at your crotch.

In fact, evolutionary biology explains this behavior. The head-lowered ram at your pelvis is a straightforward adaptation that allows children to try to prevent the introduction of extra siblings into the household. What is true for baby birds straining for a regurgitated worm is true for humans: The fewer children there are in a family, the less competition there is over a limited supply of essential resources, including food, parental nurturing, and whiffle bats.

What is not so clearly explained by evolution is why children try so hard to kill themselves. In fact, when your children start trying to kill you, it tends to come as a relief, because it usually means they have moved on from trying to kill themselves. 

Some prime ways children try to kill themselves are by climbing up stairs so they can then fall down them and by attempting to dart out into traffic. Young children look forward to walking hand-in-hand with you just so they can seize the opportunity to try to wrench their hand free and run in front of a car. 

Of course, as soon as you get home and there is no present danger, the same child will fiercely hug your leg and go limp to prevent you from walking away from them - for instance, to keep you from doing something utterly selfish, such as using the toilet.

The top way children try to kill themselves is by putting things in their mouths. Small things, shiny things, dirty things. Many children will put anything in their mouths except a vegetable - unless you count moldy brown leaves found under the welcome mat to be a vegetable. 

One thing children love putting in their mouths - and in my experience this kicks in around nine to 10 months of age - is shoes. They especially like to put their tongue on the sole of a shoe that you just wore into the public restroom at a train station. 

When I explain to people that children put things in their mouths in an effort to kill themselves, I often get someone explaining to me how putting an object in the mouth is just a child's way of learning about the world. I'm sorry, that is absurd. True, children start putting shoes in their mouths right about the time they start trying to stand upright and walk. But learning about walking by putting shoes in your mouth just is not going to work. If people could learn about things by putting them in their mouths, I'd be a Ph.D.-level entomologist after all the gnat clouds I gulped down this summer while mowing the lawn. 

Speaking of which, I gotta go. I think that's the sound of my kid trying to start up the lawn mower.

Family-Roster Minivan Decaling

Backbencher-reader Betsy, in response to last week’s post about Calvin-desecrating-a-logo rear-window decals, said, “they're still better than the cutesy stick figures that announce to the world how many members are in your family.”

Hmmm. That's a little bit hostile, isn't it? I’ve always liked minivan family-roster decaling. And I always wanted to do one for our family. The problem is, I can’t find the illustrations needed to properly represent our family unit. Based on my wife, my children, and the contents of our garage and storage shed, here’s what ours should look like:

Walt Disney World: Tips for the Unwary Traveler

A few weeks ago, I told you something of our recent family vacation to Walt Disney World, in particular, the Epcot theme-park, which was the realization of a great dream of Walt Disney to have “someplace for the monorail to go.”

I am revisiting this topic to impart another important tip for travelers: You’re better off waiting in line.

Let’s say you’ve just waited thirty minutes in line only to find yourself actually walking up three flights of stairs to take yourself past two small rooms decorated to look like Tarzan’s home.

Understandably, your next move is to seek out a ride with no line.

Do not ride that ride. Believe me, there is a very good reason no one is standing in line for it. You may not know what that good reason is, yet, but trust me, there is definitely a good reason.

Think about it this way. Remember when DVDs first came out? This highly advanced video technology offered the chance to not only see movies, but to also see “bonus features.”

The most naughtily alluring of all these was the “deleted scenes.” Twitching with excitement, you arrow-keyed your way through the DVD menu and hit select to enter that forbidden realm.

Within minutes, in a moment of unparalleled mental clarity, you reached this startling epiphany:

“Oh. I can see why they deleted that.”

A Disney World ride with no line promises the exact same thing for you as deleted scenes. When you are done, you will be approximately three minutes closer to your death than you were when you started.

Don’t do it.

Time is not the only thing you have to lose. My family experienced the horror of a no-line ride first-hand. At the Imagination! pavilion in Epcot, we found a zero-minute wait-time attraction called Journey into Imagination. What we would see, hear, and experience over the next three minutes would scar us forever.

Here’s what happens once you are strapped into the ride-pod for Journey into Imagination: A conversation ensues between a purple dragon, called Figment, and an “imagination scientist,” played by a vaguely familiar English actor who obviously owed some very dangerous people some very large amount of money when he accepted this role. And when I am on vacation, I prefer not to be bummed out by thoughts like this.

On the ride, most of what you are forced to watch consists of foam-core poster board decorated with glitter and illuminated with black lights. In other words, it’s the equivalent of a ribbon-winning heavily-parent-assisted submission to your local junior high science fair.

Along the way, the pitiable English actor and Figment engage in a spate of strained dialogue. Then things get worse. Figment operates an “imagination device” and BLAM! – all riders are hit smack in the face with a unimaginable blast of skunk-smell.

The ride’s climax is just a rewarding. The lights go out. It is pitch black. There is a LOUD bang. A barrier drops down. Flood lights suddenly illuminate a scene containing – get this – a lot of foam-core poster-board and glitter.

I wanted to sue somebody.

Really.

I hadn’t even stepped outside of our ride-pod before I started to rant about how the skunk-smell blast could constitute an actionable battery.

And I still think I’m right. The yellow pages stocked in our Walt Disney World resort hotel room was curiously devoid of any ads by attorneys specializing in “theme-park indignancies” or “smell torts,” but I’m confident I have a plausible cause of action.

If you’re admitted to the Florida bar, and you want to work on a contingency, call me.

The Miracle of Pregnancy

So why have I been talking about cribs lately? If you haven’t guessed, we’re expecting. In fact, as our family gets ready for the new arrival, I have some information I would like to share with you men out there about the miracle of pregnancy.

One of the most fascinating aspects of pregnancy is how the coming baby will affect the dreams of both you and your wife.

Heading into the third trimester, your wife’s nesting instinct will kick into high gear. Her dreams will be consumed with repainting the house, cleaning the blinds, deciding where to put the crib, etc. Don’t be surprised if you wake up at 3 a.m. to your wife tapping you on the shoulder to tell you that she just realized the changing table should not go right next to the crib because one is pine and the other is simulated maple.

Meanwhile, your dreams, as the husband, will turn darker. You can expect to have dreams such as these: (1) A diesel locomotive drives through your living room. (2) You stand by helpless as aliens try to drown a moose they’ve abducted in gelatin. (3) Above your house hovers an experimental aircraft made up of helicopter blades mounted on a speedboat with a jet engine strapped to the back.

Are these dreams brought on by the anxiety of becoming a new father? No, they are not. These dreams are triggered by the horrendous snoring coming out of your pregnant wife.

That’s right. Science tells us that as your wife’s body prepares itself for childbirth, elevated estrogen levels increase mucus production and cause swelling in the mucous membranes of the nasal passages. To boil down this medical mumbo jumbo to English, this means that as your wife is peacefully dreaming of rearranging the living room furniture, you will be dreaming of someone operating a broken vacuum cleaner three inches from your face.

A constant anxiety for new parents is how exposure to chemicals or other things in the environment might have an effect on the growing fetus. The good news is, this anxiety lessens considerably with your second child. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, Joe, we would ask questions of the obstetrician such as, “How can Mint Milanos affect the growing fetus? Should we be worried?”

My wife and I were incredibly careful when expecting Joe, but regardless, something happened during the development of his brain. As a result, he has a crippling dietary limitation whereby he refuses to eat any kind of fruit unless it has been pureed, combined with apple juice concentrate, and flattened into “FruitStrips®” that cost approximately $576 per ounce.

This leads me to an important question for those of you expecting for the second time: How should you talk with your pre-existing child about the new baby on the way?

A friend told my wife and I that we shouldn’t tell Joe too early in the pregnancy about the baby sibling growing inside his mom. “Little kids can’t really understand the concept of something like that, since it can’t be seen or touched,” she explained.

With all due respect to our friend, this is spectacularly wrong advice.

The fact is, small children are all too capable of believing in things they can’t see or touch. Tell a child there’s such a thing as – SPOILER ALERT – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or justice for celebrity criminal defendants, and they will believe you. Kids are comically easy to deceive.

As easy as it is to persuade Joe of some things, I cannot, no matter how hard I try, get Joe to believe that there could be anything edible on the inside of a pineapple. Even when you cut the thing open and eat a piece.

“A pineapple could hurt me, Daddy.”

In fact, the only time Joe may have started to doubt that we were telling the truth about there being a baby inside Mom is when we took him to see the ultrasound. We thought it would be a great way to help him feel involved in the pregnancy.

He was incredibly excited. For about five seconds. After that, he realized that the ultrasound was about the worst television show in the history of the world.

“Do you see the bone, Joe?”

“Um, maybe. Sure.”

“There! Do you see the baby’s nose?”

“Oh, yeah, I see it,” Joe offered patronizingly. “You want to play cars with me now, Daddy? I say, let’s play cars.”

“How about you wait patiently for another 10 minutes. If you can do that, I won’t try to make you eat a strawberry for the rest of the day.”

“Hmmm. Well, okay, Daddy.”

Baby Furniture to Creep You Out for a Lifetime

I write today to tell you about one of the scariest products ever to be offered for sale anywhere in the world: the lifetime crib.

When your child is old enough, the lifetime crib converts into a toddler bed. After more years have gone by, it converts into a full-size bed.

Uh huh. You heard right: This is a piece of furniture designed to last your child's ENTIRE lifetime.

The advertising materials don’t say this, but once your child has passed on, the lifetime crib can even be broken up into kindling and used as a funeral pyre.

Why, these manufacturers ask, would you buy just a crib when you could buy a single piece of furniture that will take your child through his or her entire lifetime?

BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO MAJORLY CREEP MYSELF OUT. THAT’S WHY.

Call me weird, but when I place my newborn in a crib for the first time, I’m not interested in turning to my wife and saying, “Just think, honey, decades from now, long after we are dead, our son, when he is shriveled with age and too weak to move, will take his last labored breath in this piece of furniture. Golly gee, isn’t that great?”

Baby’s Dream Furniture, Inc., for instance, sells a lifetime crib with the name – and this is actual truth – “Infinity.”

Baby’s Dream urges that their cribs will ease the baby’s transition from crib to toddler bed “because the child remains in the same environment that they have grown comfortable with.”

Yikes. Remind me that I do not want to hear Baby’s Dream’s prescription for weaning.

So here's my plea to the world's corporations: Please stop reminding me of my own mortality. You are a corporation. So I understand that, in the regular course of business, you may have to kill me with pollution, saturated fat, cholera brought on by low-flow toilets – whatever. You've got to do what you've got to do to make a buck. Fair enough. But please, please stop needlessly reminding me that I am going to die.

As bad as crib manufacturers are about reminding you of your own mortality, no one is worse than the car companies.

This is because, out of some irresistible compulsion, car companies are simply unable to make commercials about cars. They must, instead, make them about life’s transitions.

One of the creepiest car commercials of all time was a Saturn ad (below) featuring Alphaville's slow-dance prom anthem, "Forever Young."

The commercial depicts four teenagers in a Saturn Ion slowly driving through a town called “High School.” The car rolls past kids in tuxedos and prom dresses having the time of their life. It’s all very surreal and dream-like. Then the travelers in the Saturn reach a sign that says “Leaving High School.”

Having spent literally seconds in High School, the young folks then drive on down the road into the empty night.

Does this make you think about buying a Saturn? I'll tell you what it makes me think: “Oh. That’s our existence. We’re all just speeding through life in a compact mid-market sedan, racing toward an exit called ‘Death.’”

I’m doing the math in my head for the kids in the commercial. It’s a 30-second ad. If they did high school inside a half-minute, these kids are going to be dead before the next commercial break.

Cheerful!

So, let me just conclude by saying, there’s no time to go the auto mall, my friend! Just crawl in my lifetime crib and HOLD ME while the bittersweet swell of life rushes by!

__________

Illustrations:

Picture: The "Kathryn" lifetime crib from Baby's Dream. Creep-out factor: 9.7.

Video: The Saturn Ion "High School" commercial. Creep-out factor: 11.

The Author is on "Vacation"

I can’t write much now. I am on vacation with the family at Walt Disney World.

I do have one tip for you if you are making the trip here. On your way down Interstate 4, as you come up on the four exits for Walt Disney World, take a careful look around.

These few moments, before you enter the Disney realm, are crucial. Be vigilant. What do you see? My wife spotted an outlet mall. Bam! That was it! The threat we could use throughout our 10 days here.

“Stop chewing on that boat railing, or we’ll put you right back in the car and you can spend the next six hours at Mikasa and Ann Taylor Loft. Is that what you want?”

Pathways for Infection

Did you know that, in addition to “traditional” sexually transmitted diseases, unprotected sex can also lead to the transmission of influenza, gastroenteritis, conjunctivitis (pinkeye), acute colds, and other diseases? This important scientific discovery is the result of a long-term study, expected to eventually cost millions of dollars, conducted by me. In this study, I had unprotected sex with my wife, which rapidly led to extreme swelling in my wife’s abdominal area, which I characterized as “beautiful” and “glowing,” and which my wife characterized as “FAT AND HORRIBLE AND YOU DID THIS TO ME!!!!!!!!!”

After nine months, my wife produced a disease vector we named “Joe.”

Disease is what Joe brings home from daycare, other than forcibly created craft projects. Frequently, the only involvement Joe has apparently had in these craft projects is having his foot dipped in paint and imprinted on construction paper, or, on a special day, the side of toilet paper tubes.

Wait, I apologize. Joe does not go to daycare. He "attends school.” And, this is the actual truth: We get billed for “tuition” each month.

So, why, you may ask, are babies such excellent vectors for disease? Actually, you would only ask this if you are childless. Because every parent knows that other than licking toys and other objects, a baby has only two recreational habits: (1) rubbing his or her own eyes, and (2) trying to grab your eyeballs.

As a baby, our son Joe was remarkably good at sneaking a finger onto the surface of your eyeball. The blink reflex can't beat a baby's shear determination and penchant for quick unexpected movements. The thing about babies is, they look harmless enough that you will let them get pretty close to your eyeball. Then, POW! they've laid a fingertip right on your cornea. This is one important reason to keep your baby's fingernails trimmed. (Tragically, I speak from personal knowledge on this front.)

If I ever need to wear contacts, my fear of touching my own eyeball won't stop me. I'll just give them to a nearby infant, and the lenses will end up in my eyes within seconds.

Now, you might expect that health authorities would list “finger-to-eyeball” contact between persons as a primary means by which contagions are spread. Oddly, they tend not to mention this. I supposed public health authorities figure they had this covered when they already warned you about having unprotected sex, which is still America’s leading cause of eyeball-poking infants.

The best thing about getting sick as a parent, is that if you time it just right, you can create a span of approximately 15 months during which either you, your spouse, or your child is spectacularly ill. That way, even as each of your individual bodies goes through a cycle of sickness and wellness, you family unit can constantly be dealing with one affliction or another. Thus, you can make sure you take the most days off of work possible without getting even the slightest bit of enjoyment out of it. After wearing the same pair of threadbare sweatpants every day for three weeks, you will find yourself taking a bizarre kind of pride in exactly how sick you and your kids get.

One time, when Joe was really good and sick, he managed to vomit in such a way that he looked precisely like a can of white Silly String going off. It was dazzling. He was able to spew out the contents of his stomach with such force, and in such a narrow, focused stream, that I could have held him up to a car window and written “Go Team, Beat State!” if I’d had the presence of mind.

But, of course, I did not. Instead, like any good parent, I took as much of it as I could on my face. And not only because I was, at the moment he went off, holding him close to try to comfort him. It was also because, if I am going to be sick, I might as well get as much of the virus as I possibly can. All the better to try to pass something off to the non-parent population.

“Paul, how are you doing? Let me shake your hand to congratulate you about that wonderful four-week vacation you took to Peru.”

The Canadian Change Menace

In Grand Forks, North Dakota, just 76 miles from our nation's northern border, getting Canadian coinage slipped into your change is a constant annoyance. Or at least it used to be.

In my first few weeks here, I was "accidentally" given Canadian coins several times. But since September 20, 2007, I have not found so much as a maple-leafed penny in the many handfuls of change I've emptied out at the end of the day into my two-year-old son's college-tuition jar.

Can you guess what happened on September 20, 2007? That was the day that the value of the Canadian dollar peeked up over the U.S. dollar on international exchanges. Coincidence? You can draw your own conclusions. But, suddenly, "accidents" don't seem to happen at the cash register anymore.

It's not necessarily the case that the clerks at the Loaf'n'Jug on Route 2 are now sifting out the caribou-faced quarters to keep for themselves. Maybe these days there's no Queen's-head change in the till - maybe the Winnipeggers are suddenly a tad more careful when paying for their on-the-way-out-of-town Twinkies. Either way, there's something malevolent going on. And I intend to find out what. My first step will be to buy more Twinkies.

But as much as I am bothered by the Canadian coin chicanery, there is something that bothers me much more. And it should bother you too. It is this: I am apparently planning to pay for my son's college education with spare change. Pretty sad, I know. But I discussed the whole situation with him the other day, and he's okay with it. In fact, he said, and I am quoting, "I have more Cheerios and milk, please?"

Talking with your kids about sensitive matters can be difficult. If you find yourself watching public service announcements about teenage alcohol use or the perils of teen pregnancy, you probably need to change the batteries in your TiVo remote. But until you do, you may find yourself wondering, "How will I counsel my children to avoid alcohol and abstain from sex when I, myself, was not exactly squeaky clean growing up?"

Talk to them when they are two. This is by far your best bet. "It's never too early to talk to your kids about sex and alcohol abuse," I heard the announcer say in one of these commercials. Let's all take those words to heart. Sit your child down tonight with a box of juice and have the discussion. Get it done and check it off your list. Believe me, it will be one less thing weighing on your mind when the value of the U.S. dollar slips below the peso.