Wednesday, November 7th, 2007...10:54 am

Profiles in Excellence: Baby Holding

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The best way to make your girlfriend’s ovaries jump is to hold a baby.

There is something that happens to the typical woman’s brain when she sees her man (sometimes any man) embracing a helpless newborn. While men are thinking, “Don’t drop this thing, don’t drop this thing, hey, it’s like holding a football!”, women are soaking their panties with the visual of us nurturing an organism too feeble to take care of itself.

I know I’m generalizing and that some of you feel little-to-nothing when it comes to babies. If that’s the case, try looking at this photo and telling me you don’t want me to be your baby’s daddy:

alex-and-me.jpg

This little bundle of adorable vulnerability is Alexander the Great, the newborn son of my friends Greenie and Pross. The Princess and I met him this past weekend during a “baby brunch” that featured so much good lox and mimosas that I nearly forgot we were celebrating the birth of a newborn.

“Come meet the baby,” Greenie told me while I scarfed down my bagel in the living room, “Pross is feeding him.”

“Oh, no, that’s ok, I’ll wait,” I replied.

“No, really, it’s fine.”

“I don’t want to see your wife’s boobies right now.”

“She won’t mind, it’s ok, just…”

“No.”

I eventually met the infant (nicknamed Edward R. Furrow by Greenie because of his proclivity for brow-furrowing). I looked at him and thought, “Yup, that’s a baby all right. I wonder if I could eat a second helping of lox without coming off as a pig?” when Pross asked if I wanted to hold him.

My first inclination when a mom asks me to hold her child is a tentative one. I remember when I was 7 being allowed to hold my baby brother ONLY when I was sitting on the couch and under strict supervision. One time, I picked him up and carried him into the kitchen to show my parents that I could hold him like an adult.

My mom screamed and I dropped him on the linoleum floor, which explains quite a lot.

(Just kidding, I didn’t drop him; Hermanito turned out that way for different reasons.)

I told Prosser that I would love to hold her son and tried to remember how to take a handoff from a quarterback. I cradled the little guy in my arms, careful to watch for charging linemen, and made sure his head didn’t go bobbing up and down like a yo-yo.

Pross called me a “natural” and every woman in the room beamed at my pseudo-display of fatherhood. The little guy slept peacefully without vomiting or vacating his bowels, which made him instantly likable in my book.

The Princess watched me caress Alexander’s soft head, smiling and cooing with the baby as I hoped not to touch his exposed brain. Seriously, did you guys know that a baby’s cranium doesn’t fully form for months after childbirth? Why doesn’t anyone ever tell you this stuff? It’s like when I found out baby boys often pee on you while you change their diaper. I swear they’re aiming.

As we walked out of the house a little while later, I thought to myself, “Maybe I could do this. I could have a baby and be a good dad. If I can hold 10 pounds of selfish snot and poop without spiking him for a touchdown, I could, some day, have one of my own.”

As I thought this, a woman and her child were walking up the steps to the house. I turned to the kid and said, “There’s an open bar in the back.”

Then again…

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23 Comments

  • Yeah, I held a baby a couple of weeks ago. It’s a very unnatural experience. They are freakishly top-heavy. That head doesn’t seem like it’s attached right. It feels like it will fall off and roll down the living room if you don’t hold everything in place properly.

  • I heard that if you spike them butt-first it doesn’t hurt. After all, with a diaper on they have added padding. I don’t know whether it’s true, but I figure there’s only one way to find out…

  • I’m just surprised you turned down the offer of free boobies. You must be maturing.

  • I’m not even your girlfriend and my ovaries jumped looking at that picture!

    Just kidding.

    But seriously, that’s a great picture of you and your friend’s baby. You don’t look half as scared as you probably felt!

  • I love babies…as long as I can give them back to the owners when they start crying or pooping.

  • Why would one wish for their girlfriend’s ovaries to jump?

    I will say though, that you look very…paternalistic…holding a child.

  • “I don’t want to see your wife’s boobies right now”

    I’m still laughing at this quote right here!

  • i’m with the princess on this one. my sister’s kids are *awesome* birth control for me, and i actually love them.

    stick a puppy in that photo, arjew, and women everywhere would swoon in unison.

  • the ability to give them back…. or, the reason why summer camp was invented. So parents could take a break for 4 or 8 weeks from their obnoxious offspring and let someone else deal with them. I swear, parents take extra pleasure in taking their kids of ritolin for the summer without telling the counselors.

  • kids are great once they stop crapping themselves and can hold smartalecky conversations with you and fetch you a beer from the fridge.

  • whenever i see the babies & kids in our lobby from the daycare i instantly think “ohhhhh i want one.” then i get closer and hear them crying and whining and i remember why in fact i will be having no babies any time soon.

  • I’ll admit, watching Bergle with a baby is really cute. But watching him play with a puppy is cuter.

    And that’s the part where I agree with both The Princess and Jess.

  • you better have much more facial hair in the next pic i see of you….. MO-vember..is 7 days strong!!!!
    xoxo

  • Suicide_blond beat me to the ’stache reference– I was going to comment on how awesomely creepy that picture would be if it were taken in three weeks. Or how much more you’d look like most dads between 1978 and 1983.

  • Babies smell. When it’s a good smell, a cuddle is fine. When it’s a bad smell? Off to summer camp! (As H said. See, H? I’m footnoting!)

  • you’re right, when I see my husband with a baby my ovaries start exploding…it hurts…

  • Suicide_blond and mysterygirl! already mentioned this, but the moustache is pretty weak so far.

  • It’s sort of hard *not* to like babies in my family…. they just keep popping up all over the place. So I do rather like the wee ones…

    BUT for your future reference Arjewtino they have these little soft things for baby boys (or big boys I suppose) called pee pee tee pees. You just stick it on there during the diaper change and if something happens… well you’ve got it erm… covered. And they come in fun little decorative patterns with airplanes and frogs and spaceships on them.

    That is all.

  • A) The smoothness of the face is creepy.
    B) Babies are awesome, especially when you can give them away.
    C) I had no idea that until I was like 18 years old that baby poo is that freakish, radioactive orange color and the consistency of Gerber’s. I basically went apeshit when I saw it.
    D) I didn’t know until I was, like, 21 that women lactate if they hear a baby cry. That, on the other hand, did not make me go apeshit. I just laughed hysterically for about 20 minutes. So I think you have me beat on the whole maturity front.

    That’s all.

  • Wait wait wait… seriously? It’s called a “pee pee tee pee?”

    I think I’ve lost what little faith I have left in humanity. What the hell.

  • […] contact-me Profiles in Excellence: Baby Holding […]

  • Yes. It IS in fact called a pee pee tee pee.

    For example: http://www.bebabean.com/products/pptp.aspx

  • If only, when I was a baby, you dropped me on my arm, then maybe I’d have some sort of superhuman arm, like that kid from “Rookie of the Year”…that would be cool…wait a minute…what explains a lot about how I turned out?

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