As any parent can attest, trying to feed an 11-month-old baby is about as futile as trying to thread a needle with a cat while standing up in a roller coaster driven by Lindsay Lohan after a long weekend of partying as you go through the loop and into the corkscrew (of the rollercoaster, not Lindsay).

CheeriNoNos - Because Baby Won’t Eat It Unless He’s Not Allowed To Put It In His Mouth.

While I’m trying to feed my own 11-month-old son I usually talk out loud partially to entertain the the little guy for a moment or two but mostly to mask his screams of protest as I try to convince the baby that mushed carrots have another purpose other than finger paint. My conversation usually runs like this:

“Okay, good baby! Let’s put you in the high chair. Ow, that’s my hair. No, this leg goes down here. No, here. Why are you screaming? Stop. It’s just a chair. Put your leg here. Okay, here, that leg goes here. How many legs do you have? Where’s your arm? Where are my glasses? Ow, that’s my hair again. Okay, you’re in good enough. Here, try some carrots. You don’t want them? Woah, stop swinging your arms. No, this is a spoon with carrots. They’re good for you. They’re… on the floor. Okay, that was fun, right? Here, you want to feed yourself? Have a spoon. No, that’s the wrong end. That’s the other wrong end. No, that’s your nose. Here, want some carrots? I don’t even know where those went. What’s in your hair? Here, have another spoon. Okay, here’s another one. One more. Okay, forget the spoon. Put your hands back in the carrots. Where’d your bib go? Here’s the doggy! Yes, that’s the doggy. Yes, the doggy is licking the wall again. That’s where your carrots went. Do you want some… Okay, okay, stop screaming. Here, have an animal cracker….”

And then all is well. I throw away the baby food jar and tell my wife what a good eater the baby was. When she asks me where all the animal crackers went I just say I was hungry.

Our baby son, being our own little Baby Einstein, has quickly put together that being strapped into a high chair means he’s about to have globs of pureed meat and vegetables rammed down his throat for the next 20 minutes until my wife and I collectively decide that 1) We both need a good stiff drink and 2) baby has had enough to “eat” where the word “eat” means flung all over the room and smeared so much in his hair that he looks like a little light haired Squiggy. Instead of just giving in and letting us shovel in little piles of mush and oatmeal, our baby son quickly turns to screams and howls of protest which make us wonder if his high chair is padded with broken glass or at the very minimum is attached to a live car battery with rusty alligator clips.

By the end of each meal our dining room looks like someone set off a charge of dynamite in a farmer’s market.

This would be frustrating enough if it weren’t compounded by the fact that at the exact moment we free Baby Coffee from the confines of the dreaded high chair he immediately returns to smiles and giggles and burps and babbling. And the second we put him on the floor he crawls around the room grabbing everything he can and, here’s the ironic part, puts it all in his mouth and tries to eat it.

My son is crawling around my office and pulling himself up on various pieces of furniture as I write this. In the past three minutes he has tried to put the following into his mouth: my mouse, my keyboard, a stapler, the dog, his hands, both cats, a pen, my shoe, my leg, a dog treat, my keys, his foot, his shoe, a pair of headphones, the baby monitor, an electrical cord and the bill for the mortgage. I let him have the last one.

By watching this behavior I’ve learned several things:

1. My son is probably not going to be a very picky eater.
2. Baby food companies are really missing out on a big opportunity here.

Instead of packaging baby food in little jars or making baby treats in simple shapes like stars and circles and cute little animals, baby food should be made to resemble things that are dangerous and should not, under any circumstances, be touched by a baby! I’m thinking we could have Cheerios shaped like knives, animal crackers shaped like car keys and cookies fashioned to look like TV remotes.

Mushy foods could be freeze-dried or just frozen in much the same way. You’d have strained carrots in the shape of daddy’s cell phone, blended fruit medley in the shape of mommy’s earrings and pureed turkey and potato dinner that looks like dog poo (not really much of a stretch with that one). Of course I’ll have to give them a cute name like “CheeriNoNos” and have a clever ad campaign featuring the voice of Antonio Banderas because, well, that’s pretty much all he does now.

To make sure your baby gets enough to eat, you just scatter these dangerous looking CheeriNoNo snacks around the house in places you can’t imagine your baby can possibly get to. Under the bed, behind the toilet, and on top of ceiling fans are all excellent places to put this baby food because those are some of the places he’ll look first for Things To Put In His Mouth.

I hope this helps some of you fellow parents out there who are trying to get your babies to eat. There’s no need to thank me. I get all the reward I need knowing there’s a toddler out there who hasn’t eaten strained peas in weeks, but will soon be happily munching away on an animal cracker shaped like a jailhouse shiv.

It just brings a smile to my face…

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Here we see the typical Chinese attention to detail. This is a close-up of the back of a razor-sharp plastic toy shovel my infant son likes to play with.

When my wife and I heard about all the latest toy recalls due to shoddy and unsafe manufacturing practices used in Chinese factories, we did what all good American parents did: ran around the house in hysterics, grabbing all the toys that could have been made anywhere near Southeast Asia, threw them out on the front lawn, doused them with kerosene and immediately torched them until they were nothing but a pile of dirty, black ashes which we gathered into a coffee can and put on the first FedEx plane back to China.

At that moment we decided to give our infant son only toys that were manufactured in the good ol’ ethical United States of America where we have strict safety laws to protect products from harming consumers.

Right now my infant son is chewing on a Marlboro Red hard pack and rolling around a pint of Jim Beam. Ahh, America! And while I’m ripping the cellophane off his box of cigs I realize something important:

We should be congratulating these Chinese toy companies that are making thousands of products with lead paint and then selling them to Americans!

“But why?!?” I hear you ask incredulously. Because the Chinese have finally figured out how capitalism really works:

1. Make a cheap product that undersells everyone else, putting all your competition out of business.
2. As your competition dwindles, lower your quality to the point where you’re actually insulting or harming the customers that put you on top.
3. When you get caught you should apologize profusely and promise it will never ever happen again.
4. Do it all again.

It’s sort of like the “Circle of Life” from Disney’s The Lion King, except this involves Dora the Explorer, Thomas the Train Engine, a few buckets of lead paint and millions of Chinese people working for the equivalent of slave wages.

This capitalistic cycle has worked for Wal-Mart for all these years, so why wouldn’t it work for manufacturing companies in China? Wal-Mart moves into a town, undersells all the other stores and forces them to close. Then, when Wal-Mart is the only store left, they begin treating their employees like slaves, their customers like dogs and and their products like something Kathy Lee Gifford would endorse. Every so often Wal-Mart is caught and someone with an Alabamanian accent apologizes on TV and announces a new sale. Everything goes back to normal until they’re caught again.

Now that the Chinese have learned about this little trick they’ve started using it in just about everything they make. From deadly dog food to toxic toothpaste to poison covered baby toys, you have to admit that the Chinese are quick studies. I’m worried, however, that they’ll soon run out of ways to make ordinary things deadly. If that happens then their economy collapses and causes world-wide economic mayhem.

So in the the interest of keeping the world economy thriving with new Chinese exported products, here are some other items that are made in China and how they can be made more deadly:

Chopsticks: Give them a quick rinse down with cyanide before packaging to reduce germs.

Electronic Equipment: Sprinkle gunpowder over all the circuit boards and power supply before final assembly to make sure everything slides together easily.

Dog food: Pour lead paint into food instead of melamine for added coloring.

Baby Toys: Cover them with melamine instead of lead paint (gotta mix it up sometimes!).

Clothing: Weave asbestos into all the fabrics for “durability.”

American Flags: Use radioactive dye for that “I’m so proud of America that my flag glows!” look.

We can only hope the Chinese continue to produce products with the same low-cost profiteering methods that they have in the past. I mean, how else will we be able to afford replacing all those baby toys we just threw away?

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Quick! Which end of the baby does this belong to?

If I showed you a list of things I cared about before becoming a father I can guarantee that someone else’s poop would not be in my top 10 list. But having a baby changes your priority list so that truly important thoughts like “How did Michael Bay manage to make The Transformers Movie suck and not suck at the exact same time?” gets mixed in with “Did the baby poop in the last 12 hours? And, almost more importantly, what kind of poop was it?”

Yes, there are “kinds” of poop. And they’re very important.

You knew that, of course. You probably even paid attention to it when you weren’t feeling well. But baby poop is a lot more important than your own poop. You see, a baby’s poop is about as close as one gets to actually having dashboard gauges on your little bundle of joy. If Baby has too much rice and bananas and not enough liquid and you get… well… you get nothing. Too much fiber and prunes and you get mud pie city in his pants.

When you have a baby these types of poop aren’t just some passing fact that is forgotten when the fan is turned off. As a parent poop becomes something you study and hold up to the light and clap and cheer about. Poop consumes your life when you have a baby. Poop becomes an actual conversation topic that you could go on about for days.

“Did the baby poop today?”

“Yes, he had a load in his diaper when he woke up.”

“What kind was it?”

“Brown and a little sticky. It was good poop! But do you think we’re giving him too much rice?”

‘Hmm, I don’t know. Yesterday he had pellets, but the prunes seemed to have helped. It wasn’t black at all, right?”

“Oh no, not at all! Say, remember that green sticky mustard poop he had when he was born?”

“Ohhh yeah! That was so cute!”

“Yeah… Ahh, good times… good times!”

“Those are the memories we’ll cherish…”

This sort of talk counts as foreplay in our house these days.

As a parent you’ll experience each end of the poop spectrum and everything in between. Our little Baby Coffee has had days where he produced nothing but screams and little poop marbles which were harder and more perfectly round than any space-age ball bearing I’ve ever seen. We’ve also had days where our little angel from heaven has shot water out his butt like it was a fire hose.

The trick, of course, is to regulate your finely tuned poop machine with every kind of food so that your baby doesn’t produce solid poop marbles through screams or poop slushies with giggles. Keeping baby’s poop consistent requires the same precision and balance that you normally reserve for regulating the chemicals in your swimming pool. It isn’t always an easy task and there are times when the science just doesn’t add up.

For example, we’ve learned that our Baby Coffee can turn a mere 3 spoonfuls of prunes into approximately 350 gallons of poop in about 24 hours. This, of course, makes no sense at all. This has also led me to wonder if I can sell baby poop as some sort high-end organic fertilizer to rich snots on eBay. So far my wife has prevented me from trying. She never lets me have any fun.

We’ve also learned that if we bring Baby Coffee anywhere within 50 feet of a banana or piece of rice his little backside clamps up like Alberto Gonzalez before a Senate Committee: we hear a lot of noise, but nothing substantial ever seems to come out.

You don’t truly understand any of these poopy predicaments until you actually become a parent for the first time. No book in the world can explain why normally sane parents get as excited over a little pile of poop in a diaper as they would if they just found a diamond in their Cheerios. We just do.

For those of you who not yet parents: you probably shouldn’t read this article. It might gross you out and prevent you from ever having children of your own or ever touching a baby again.

For those of you who are parents: have any of you tried fertilizing your garden with this stuff? Hmm….

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