How To: Make Your Baby Awesome

Example of a baby. A bored one.

You want an awesome baby, right? You don’t want some lumpy blob of no fun. Everyone wants to have the “cool kid,” but we all know that there is a caste system in life and not everyone is going to be a rock-awesome-of-funtasticness that I am. Or maybe, that you were. Or are. I don’t know you, you could be terrible. I can’t make sweeping generalizations about you and your kind. That would just be rude.

So, to begin, do you have a baby?
Go and check. 
Yes or No?


If yes, read on to learn how to mind-control your baby into a sphere of awesome known only as “Bouncy House of Awe-Inspiring.”

If no, I have to take a moment and question your place in this world. Are you hoping to have a baby at some point, and want a jumpstart on figuring out how to make it into one of the cool kids who wear light-up shoes and say funny things? Do you have friends who have lame babies and are hoping to aunt-or-uncle them into coolness? Do you have no baby on the horizon and are just reading this to creep out the people who do have legitimate kids and may or may not be reading this over your shoulder while you are on borrowed wifi at some trendy  overpriced place like Starbucks or Target or Babies R Us? Obviously, I understand the goal of reading this blog in order to be cool, as that is always the end result of reading it. But don’t be creepy.

I can tell you from personal experience, and that of everyone I have ever known and will ever possibly know: Creepiness very rarely pays off for you. You remember back in the day, when you were young, and you’d go to a bar or a club all dressed up and young and pumped full of adrenaline and tequila, and you’d be dancing along, no rhythm but lots of enthusiasm, and you look up and THERE, right across the dance floor, is the creepy old man/woman who is about 3 decades older than anyone in a 2 mile radius, bopping along, pretending to “get” the music like all those young whippersnappers, and then you’d accidentally make eye contact? And you think to yourself “what is this old person doing at a rave?” Before you remember it’s not a rave, it’s a public bar and they have as much right to be there as you, if not more, given they’ve probably been going there since before you were born, and that just adds to the creepiness factor.

allisonladolcevita.blogspot.com/2011/06/scavengers.html

Perfect example of Creepy-old-man-at-bar Syndrome. Or, COMABS.



Back to the babies. As we get older, our friends start getting married, some are having kids, some are denouncing children all together, some get knocked up by accident and then have really rad children, some may possibly have lame kids. They say at some point our biological clock starts ticking and we feel an urge to spread our seed, our last names, and our political leanings into the next generation. I don’t know when your clock starts ticking, but mine is impressively silent right now.

Babies are a lot of things. They are funny looking sometimes, they are interesting, they can be fun, and they are often silly little children doing silly little children things. One of my favorite lines from a movie is from Knocked Up, and it’s “I wish I loved anything the way my kids love bubbles.” I still love bubbles, so there.

But you can change the course of fate! You CAN make your baby rad. You can help guide and form your kids into supercool little mini-humans who look and act like little droids full of awesome.

1. Sunglasses. Sunglasses make everyone look a bit cooler. Buy your kid some baby sized aviators, maybe some Ray Bans, slap them on the face of your child, and watch him or her or it walk a little taller.

2. Chucks. Put your kid in converse. Little tiny baby shoes are already adorable. Make them cooler by making them Converse and/or light-up sneakers. You gotta start them out young. Also make sure to include a lecture about what hipsters are and how not to become one if they still want to be a member of your family.

Epically cool bearded child.

3. Tiny beards. You should find a baby hat (they make tons of them, apparently babies really need hats) and sew a tiny baby-sized fake beard onto the hat and have your child wear a fake beard. This ups the levels of mind-blowingly cool in multiple ways. For one, beard are always cool. Especially fluffy ones. Secondly, it is even more hilarious if yours is a girl-child, and the confusion from strangers will be more than worth it. And lastly, it can serve to keep your chubby-cheeked small ones face nice and warm and fluffy.

Caution: May become a bearded adult.

4. Dress them ironically. Your child’s clothing is a reflection of both the kid AND YOU. We know babies can’t dress themselves. They’re too short to reach the hangers in the closet, you fool! Have your kid wear ironic T-shirts like “I am an 80s kid!” and “I remember Nixon.” DO NOT ALLOW SKINNY JEANS ON YOUR CHILD. If your baby seems to have a preference for skinny jeans, you better stomp that tendency out of them YOUNG. Do not allow your child to become a hipster, or you will forever be hearing such things as “I was into this music WAY before it was cool” and “Mom, can you buy me some more guyliner?” And yes, you will even know what guyliner is. Whoa.

5. Make them listen to cool music whenever they are trapped in a car with you. Expose your kid to your favorite types of music and have them grow up listening to it. Unless you have bad taste, then leave it to classics like Beatles, The Temptations, Sinatra, all 80s music, and of course, epic hair band power ballads. If your kid doesn’t know “Total Eclipse of The Heart,” then I don’t want to know your kid. And neither will you.

That kid is having a good time.

6. Toss your kid high in the air. The other part of this instruction is to CATCH the kid. If you miss the second part, then you are probably mentally and physically scarring your kid for life, and setting yourself up to pay thousands in therapy later on. But be a little rough with your kid. Let them play, get hurt a little, scrape knees, jump high, get thrown around. It’s normal, it’s fun and you don’t want your baby to be scared of those kinds of things once they aren’t babies anymore. Start them young. Wrestle, play, whatever. Maybe don’t allow them to go hang-gliding at 2 years old, but yeah, let them play like regular kids, and teach them how there’s no crying in baseball when there’s blood. Or bandage and kiss it and send them back to play. Whatever works.


So, there you go. I, a childless 20-something, has taught you a valuable lesson here. Go forth and apply these methods to yours or other people’s (possibly not complete strangers, again: creepy.) children. Let me know how it goes.