Harmlessly Adorable Experiments With Babies

Last week my friends were out here in LA, scouting for apartments and potentially a new house as part of their grand adventure here in the Great State of California. (We are legally mandated to call it that because we don't want the tourists to know we're broke.) I was happy to put them up while they pursued their quest.

For whatever reason, they brought their 16-month-old daughter. (School's out? Daycare gets expensive after the first 78 hours? They are responsible, loving parents? -Don't ask me. This whole parenting thing is like quantum physics: I just put the elements together in a room and indirectly observe the resulting collisions.)

Fortunately, despite being a two-legged physics experiment, their daughter is the most adorable baby in the world.*

*With the exception of YOUR baby. Your baby is super-cute. Like, unnaturally so. So amazingly cute, it's really transcended all normal baby-dom and attained a class-of-its-own level of cuteness that makes it unfair to compare other babies. It's like comparing Rod Carew to Mary Steenburgen. They're both great at what they do, but your baby is in a whole different line of work when it comes to cuteness. Plus, your baby is probably not going to marry Ted Danson.

(That's not a knock against Rod Carew. He was, like, an important sports guy. Or something.)

After five days of intensive research, here is what I have learned about babies:

• When babies arrive in Los Angeles, they should be super tired. It's like 11pm where they're from! They should have gone to bed like 3 or 4 hours ago. But they are not tired.
• Mostly they are glad to be out of that damn car seat and/or airplane chair. Look! An entire apartment to run around in!
• Babies do not run. They toddle. Although technically toddling does not begin for another two months.
• This baby is not only adorable, she is an overachiever!
• Toddling serves two purposes:
  1. It provides a means of conveyance toward the nearest fragile/dangerous/electrical object in the vicinity.
  2. It directly tests whether mom or dad are actively observing the baby.
• Fortunately, after 16 months, mom and dad have developed some formidable baby-observation skills.
• That's good because my apartment is a veritable toddler minefield of fragile, dangerous, and electrical objects.
• Toddler Fact #1: A 16 month-old baby cannot lift a 42-inch flatscreen TV.
• Toddler Fact #2: This will not prevent them from attempting to do so.
• Toddler Fact #3: Most toddler experiments designed to help define the operational limits of what they can lift, carry, throw, eat, or bang on the table will be ruined by the intervention of one or more grown-up types who seem to think they "know better."
• Toddler Fact #4: Grown-ups may "know better" but they do not fun better.
• You have cleaned your apartment. THOROUGHLY. You have THOROUGHLY CLEANED your apartment.
• Babies were put on this earth to show you just how deeply, deeply deluded you are.
• Who takes every single DVD you own off the shelf and inspects each one for dust? A baby does.
• To be fair, this is the punishment you get for never opening that copy of Run Lola Run.
• Franka Potente is hot! Seriously, why is this DVD all dusty and encased in the original shrinkwrap. You should really watch this movie, it is a good movie, even though you saw it in the theater when it first came out. You could stand to see it again and not just let it sit on your shelf in the dust. Franka deserves better than this. No wonder she won't make out with you and/or answer your fan mail.
• Sometimes it's weird how babies' voices sound just like your conscience.
• Your friends anticipated that you would not have any baby toys, so they packed a box of their own.
• Your friends did not anticipate that a large bucket of hats is a far more interesting baby toy than anything they put in the box.
• Question: How many hats can Tom put on!?
• Answer: How many hats does Tom own!?
• Answer-Answer: More than eight.
• An Incomplete List of Impromptu Baby Toys:
  • Three issues of Wired magazine.
  • The stereo system.
  • A promotional pamphlet from 2006.
  • A roadmap of the state of Minnestoa.
  • Two pairs of metal bookends.
  • The complete boxed set of His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.
  • Any board game with a large assortment of cards or tiles inside.
  • A tin container of coasters.
  • Coasters.
  • The external hard drive for a Dell Optiplex 380.
  • The remote for the VCR.
  • (Who still has a VCR??)
  • The wrapper from a fortune cookie.
  • (Seriously, a VCR?)
  • The garbage can.
  • The cassette deck.
  • (Ok, dude, did this baby travel back in time to 1985? WTF.)
  • Any one of the 700 primed, unpainted Dungeons & Dragons miniatures you have stashed around your apartment.
  • (Now it's just getting weird.)
  • A ball.
• Sometimes, when you are a baby, you bump into the nose of the little yellow lion scooter, and then the lion lights up and begins to play one of the two songs programmed into its little lion head, and then it's Baby Baby Dance Dance Revolution time.
• There's not a lot of footwork in Baby Baby Dance Dance Revolution, but there is a lot of unbridled joy.
• If you went to the Armenian grocery store -- which, for some unfathomable reason is called The Olive Garden, even though they don't serve bottomless salad -- and you got some inscrutably labelled yogurt that was made in Armenia, or Israel, or Yogurtistan, or whatever is Cyrillic for "Exotic And Fancy" and you mix it up with some fresh blueberry preserves but then your baby does not want to consume or even sample the delicious concoction you have spent the last ten minutes preparing, do you know what that means?
• That means in ten minutes your baby is going to projectile vomit all over the back seat of your rental car.
• But after that: ALL BETTER!
• If you are a somewhat loud dude who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in California, a sixteen month-old baby is not going to be entirely sure about you for at least a couple days.
• Then, by Friday, you are hanging out together, reading a picture book and eating cookies while mom and dad pack.
• If there's time, you might even get in one last round of Baby Baby Dance Dance Revolution.
• Then, it's back to that damn car seat and airplane chair.
• Babies. It's a lot of work being adorable.