In this desolate wasteland, there are not many opportunities to relax. You may think, “I barely have time to clean my apartment; how can I find time to have kids?” Buzzsaw understands that pregnancy can be overwhelming – even for fathers – so we wish to offer some advice on preparing for your little bundle of surrealist chaos.
The best place to start is right in your apartment. Your sparse, dilapidated furniture may have rough or sharp edges, which are major hazards for little tikes! Try styrofoam corners or baby gates to avoid any accidents once your little one mobilizes. Additionally, your home could likely benefit from a nice deep clean. Use this time to rid your radiators of dust or those pesky singers that tend to sneak in there. Oldies may make good lullabies, but not from full-cheeked strangers! Apropos of air quality, invest in an air purifier – industrial smog is not healthy for infant lungs.
Now, preparing the living space is one thing, but you have to know how to care for the life itself! You’ll need to stock up on clothes, food, and diapers. In the early weeks and months, your baby will mostly be swaddled in medical gauze, which secures its limbs – which may or may not exist) – in a safe, comfortable position. Food will be a more flexible facet of your childcare journey; your baby will likely eat whatever you put in front of them. This includes but is not limited to: vague-looking jelly, salads tossed by decrepit old women, and chicken breasts that are effectively still clucking.
You may be thinking, “This is all incredibly helpful and informative, but what about the baby itself?” Great question – your child will be borderline evil. Expect the creature to be a slimy, dinosaur-esque nuisance that will ruin your life. You can try all you want to get it to stop crying, but you will likely be unsuccessful. But don’t be discouraged! Leave the emotional distress to your wife, who will leave you once she reaches her breaking point. Upon this development, your parenting skills are going to need to kick in, so read carefully.
Things will get really lonely really fast. Your hot neighbor across the hall may seem tempting, but she’s probably going to ditch you for someone hotter who has not fathered a grotesque monster. You don’t have time for romance anyway – your baby is starting to get sick! Yes, those sounds mean that it can’t breathe, so do with that what you will. The sores all over its body are another story – your guess is as good as ours. We would, however, advise against touching them. It probably won’t be a huge fan of that.
Don’t worry if your health starts to take a hit either, because that is totally normal! Your bizarre visions are merely a manifestation of your sexual frustrations and fear of fatherhood, peppered with the surreality that haunts you already. However, if you dream that your baby’s weird little head replaces your own, which is then turned into a pencil eraser, don’t take that as an indictment on your personal life. Use it as a sign to try out a new hairstyle.
However you interpret your dreams, they will have to take a backseat to your child’s health. Things are starting to look dire for the little monster, so be extra cautious when treating it. Whatever you do, do not unwrap the medical gauze! This can and will cause irreparable damage to its body, regardless of whether you speed up the process by stabbing your child with a pair of scissors. The last thing you want is for it to become enormous and start chasing you around the apartment.
While this parenting guide is not comprehensive, we believe it contains all of the necessities to surviving the stressful early months of parenthood. We here at Buzzsaw hope you can mend things with your wife, or at the very least your pervy mother-in-law. There is nothing wrong with being a single father, of course, but who wouldn’t want another kid after this experience?
Brian Murray is a first year writing for film, television and emerging media major who is thinking of adopting his own grey humanoid. You can find Brian at [email protected].