All I want is one day where this baby sleeps consistently like he did the night before.

Also, a day without mega poops … the kind that peel the paint from the walls and make you want to claw your nostrils out of your face to boot.

And as long as we’re just making abstract wishes here that are never in a million years likely to come true, a pepperoni pizza the size of my house would be pretty swell, too!

Being a new parent is tough, and tedious, and I’m still not sure if they give away awards for it or anything, even though I keep checking my mailbox every day just in case. People tell me that becoming a new parent must give me all sorts of new material as a humor columnist, and they’re right! Already I could probably write no less than a three volume reference set citing the joys and woes of diaper duty alone…

…but when would I write it?!

That, therein lies the real new parenting conundrum, so while I continue to work on solving the mysteries of time and baby food, here are some of my latest observations that may very well encompass the new format of my beloved humor column here for roughly the next 15 – 17 years!

• Feeding a newborn via spoon is an invitation for disaster that I most certainly took for granted when my wife was still breastfeeding.
• That said, it has now been confirmed that our dog Cleo has absolutely no shame whatsoever by not only licking the excess baby food from our child’s face, but also from inside of our child’s mouth while he’s still trying to eat it!
• I can only imagine that the mixing of baby formula while its recipient screams melodramatically in the background is kind of what like bomb specialists endure when they’re deciding whether to cut the red wire or the blue wire.
• As awful as I thought it was for the air conditioning to go out in Florida in the middle of summer, I can now confirm that it’s roughly a bajillion times worse when you’ve also got an infant at stake who desperately needs to go to sleep…
• Although I wasn’t the horrible parent who decided it was ok to take my young children to the theater to see the equally horrible Jason Segel / Cameron Diaz comedy Sex Tape, somebody else sure felt ok with taking their 10 year-old kids and somehow I still feel a little guilty just by being in the vicinity.
• It seems cruel and unnecessary to insist on taking a child’s temperature in the butt … or any person’s temperature there, for that matter.
• Equally cruel, but at least a necessity, is the one and only method of extracting boogers from your infant’s nose because much like a thermometer up the butt, nobody likes a syringe stuck up their nose when they’ve got the sniffles, either.
• It’s hard not to be at least a little envious of somebody who pretty much just sleeps and bounces all day.
• I find that there’s no better way to instill a fear of flying in your child at an early age than by throwing them up in the air playing rocket ship … while there’s a ceiling fan spinning overhead!
• And last but not least, I may still have a lot to learn about parenting … a lot to learn! … but one thing I do know is that when faced with the choice of buying a swimsuit featuring a shark and another swimsuit featuring a pirate shark, it pretty much goes without saying that pirate shark wins every time.