My dumbshit baby

The baby is crying again. So I ask, so what am I supposed to do? I'll go in there, ask it to calm down, and it'll just keep crying. I'll ask it what it wants (using hand signals, since it's pretty hopeless when it comes to understanding spoken language) and it'll just keep on crying. So I close the door, roll up a towel and put it in front of the crack between the door and the floor and whatever. Let it cry.

This baby is such a fucking dumbass. I mean, I know all babies are stupid, but honestly, this one takes the fucking cake. It can't even burp on its own, that's what really riles me up. You have to pick it up and put it over your shoulder and hit its back until you force the air out. I can't keep myself from burping during important dinners and here I am, being made to burp for this baby, or else it gets fussy and cries, natch. Always crying.

Why couldn't we have had a smart baby? Mark at work has a smart baby and he's a moron. Mark's baby can already stand. Swear to God, I think it strolled out of the womb twirling an umbrella. Mark's baby can already reach cookies and sharp knives on high shelves. It stacks shit up and climbs and pulls itself up. Mark and his dumbass wife have to lock up the knives. Seriously, the baby got to a knife last week and Mark's wife flipped out. The baby was just standing there on a trash bin, slicing celery like nothing was up, and it turned its head to watch its mother screaming, and all the while this baby is not even putting the knife down, it's still just slicing away. So they put the knives under lock and key, but the baby's gonna find the key, I guarantee it. Give my dumbshit baby a key and it wouldn't even be smart enough to put it in its mouth. It would just look at you like it was waiting for you to put the thing on a spoon and shove the thing down its throat, waving its dumb fat arms like a maniac.

The baby can't even grab. I know, you don't believe me, "babies grab everything." Not this idiot. You put your finger up to its baby face and all it can do is reach out and push your finger with its palm. I saw a picture the other day of a monkey holding a stick, using it to dig termites out of an old, moldy stump. The monkey had figured out tools! So, that's just a contrast, to give you some idea of what we're dealing with.

Mark's baby is playing tennis. I saw it. I played against it, in fact. I won 6-4 6-3, but it gave me the workout of my life. The kid returns everything. I don't even know how he gets the ball over the net, but you can't get anything past this baby. It twirls its racket like it's just enjoying the sun passing through the laces and you say, "OK, ace coming up, no prob," and before you know it the baby's scorched a return down the far endline. I throw my socks at my baby and it doesn't even move. Just lets them pile up.

I don't know who our baby gets it from. It looks like me, but I was always a very smart baby. I used to give the dog haircuts. It would just sit in my lap while I trimmed its fur with my safety scissors. And those were fucking good haircuts too. And my wife is smarter I am, although I never admit it. One of the baby's aunts has a brain disease, though I don't think it's that. The baby doesn't have a brain disease; it's just fucking stupid, that's all.

This is our second baby and the first we kept. I was so excited about that first baby. I thought--how wonderful. We'll bring this creature into the world and teach it life. I imagined a blank slate, a clean white page, and with our attention and our love we would fill it with truth until it was the greatest greatest thing that ever was. And what came out of my wife was this shriveled purple thing that was already screaming, that already resented us. It had its own plan and we weren't part of it. "Keep it," I told the doctor and the nurses, "just keep it." The two of us went home without the baby and my wife parked herself in front of the TV (she was upset because she still wanted to keep the baby, even though she had seen it just as clearly as I had) and I went out and bought a skateboard and spent the whole rest of the night practicing in the driveway and by the next morning I had already taught myself how to do an ollie and a kickflip and a manual.