Babies

Everyone I know is having babies.

Well, not everyone. Not the men, obviously. When their wives or girlfriends are having babies men like to boast about their masculine involvements and martyr-like tolerance of the hormonal swings and cravings. Who's doing all the real work, though?

In the past year, here are the babies who've come into my life:
1: My neighbor to the East had a baby - Kieran.
2: My neighbor to the West had a baby girl - Sylvie
3: My neighbor to the West is pregnant again - ? They thought, before Sylvie, that she couldn't get pregnant.
4: One coworker at Cedar Springs had a beautiful baby boy. Somehow she kept him safe inside her inspite of the agressive, violent children we worked with.
5, 6, 7, 8, 9: Four women I know well from a particular local group had bunches of babies in the past two years - Oliver, Ruby, Kennedy and a couple of others whose names I can't recall at the moment.
10. My brother's wife had a baby girl in July - Abigail.
11. My brother-in-not-law's (because the bigots in Colorado voted to define marriage as one man and one woman legally and will not allow me to recieve civil union benefits from my spouse) wife had a baby girl in August - Shayla.
12. My cousin by illegal marriage had a baby boy in October - Gavin.

Babies - similar to parasites while in the womb. It's not even a mutually beneficial situation, unless you consider the expectant joy and all that glowing. Well, and the loose, comfortable clothes. Okay, and the weight. I'd have an excuse for several months for gaining weight. Considering the constant drain on a woman's internal resources, the growth of a living organism inside her, feeding, bound by blood. Sounds like a horror film, really.

Babies - if I'm still fertile I should be able to sell my babies on Ebay.

Babies - I'm thinking of going out and getting really drunk so that Heidi and I can have a baby of our own. It seems to work for so many others.

Babies - why aren't they more like Octopi? What? Well - an octopus can exhale a lot of its water, make itself very thin, and get through tiny holes in coral reefs and such. Why didn't God or Allah or Yaweh or whatever higher power may exist make babies' heads more like Octopi so that they could become really narrow to make childbirth less painful? Yes, I've read about the Garden of Eden and the snake and all that.

Babies - I'm also thinking that if I get pregnant for some reason, somehow, someday that I should chain smoke so that the baby is really small and doesn't hurt so much coming out. I mean so that I don't hurt while it comes out.

Babies. So much to consider.

I'm kidding about the chain-smoking, in case you don't know me and are reading this. Sometimes I imagine that I'd like to have a child. Then I think about how messy my house is, and how much of an obligation dogs have been. I really love other people's children, though. We'll see.