Nine Out of Ten Babies Agree

I took my wife to the OBGYN today. I say "I took my wife to the OBGYN" as opposed to "My wife and I had an OBGYN appointment today" because I think men who stake a claim to pregnancy are horribly deluding themselves. Let's be real here--we're not doing any of the heavy lifting. The doctor--I'm assuming it was a doctor, as all I had time to see was a blue blur--managed to measure my wife's abdomen, listen to the baby's heartbeat, advise us both to drink lots of fluids, and perform a pelvic exam in less than .8 seconds. I believe this is a new world record. To show off, the doctor actually threw cup of coffee in the air upon entering the room, performed the entire exam, then caught the cup before it hit the ground without spilling a drop. She then struck a bad-ass kung-fu stance (crane style, I believe) and scampered off across the surface of a lake. My insurance dollars at work...

She told us what we already knew: my wife is going to have a baby in about two weeks.

In the car afterwards, we listened to a little bit of a radio call-in show. More accurately, my wife "listened" while I was "subjected" to the show. Now she can never claim that I don't understand the pain of giving birth.

The topic of the show was baby sign language. It seems that American parents, at a loss for a way to start screwing up their children even earlier, have started teaching nine month old babies sign language. The idea is that the babies are cognitively capable of communicating, even though they haven't developed the physical ability to speak. Thus, sign language provides them a means of communication.

Let's stop here for just a moment. Of all the people in the entire world that I could have a conversation with, there is no doubt in my mind that a nine month old baby would be at the bottom of that very long list. Their input is not needed.

I don't know about you, but my experience has been that babies are unmotivated and extremely self-centered. Can you really imagine an engaging conversation with an infant? Could they offer anything that might shift your paradigm?

Advocates will argue that sign language gives a baby the means to express their needs. WHAT NEEDS?! IT'S A BABY! It needs to sleep, eat and soil itself. At nine months, it's pretty much just a tube that other things pass through. I can guarantee you that those other things are not pithy observations and witty bon mots.

And who says a baby should get everything it wants, anyway? If you ask me, infancy is the developmental period devoted to teaching us the most precious lesson of all: You can't always get what you want. Half the problem in the world today is that everyone believes they should be able to have what they want all the time. I guarantee you that as babies, Hezbollah used sign language.

Can you imagine a world where babies are allowed to indulge their every whim? Where we do their bidding and pile pudding and kitties at their tiny feet--which they can't even stand on yet? Where we load them into those bizarre chest carriers that make them look like bulletproof baby body-armor, but instead of us wearing them, they're wearing us like some kind of giant, biologically engineered, id-driven exoskeleton?

Shouldn't we cherish the one to three years we have where the damn things can't communicate? Isn't that the dream of every parent of a teenager? I'l tell you right now, if my kid somehow learns sign language on his own, I'm putting mittens on him (and yes, we know it's a boy--I'm not just being sexist).

There are only two reasons I can think of to teach a baby sign language:

1. You only teach them cool phrases that amuse you.
A baby that constantly signs the phrase "resistance is futile" or "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" would be pretty awesome. I have always said that, given my choice, my child's first words would be "foolish mortals". If I could get him to do it in sign language, the appeal would be diminished somewhat, as it would only freak out people who could understand what he was signing. However, I would just counteract this by hanging out with more deaf people.

2. You have septuplets, and you want to stage your own bizarre, infant production of Children of a Lesser God.
Take that, Von Trappes! Where's your "do-re-mi" now? That's what I thought! What? Where are you going? What, are you going to walk to Switzerland where there's no sign-language-knowing-baby competition? Fine! Just go on and go then! Looks like I figured out a way to solve a problem like Maria! Boo-ya!