Bad Baby

Being a baby’s not easy. Conditions are less than ideal. You have negligible motor and language skills. You can’t always get your hands on food when you want it. House pets are bigger than you, often by a multiple of five or six. Then, of course, you have parents, and not of your own choosing. They don’t understand how rich and complicated your emotional life is. Indeed, they spew only nonsense syllables.

Remember what it was like? Don’t lie. If you remembered, you’d have been hard pressed to make babies of your own. Thanks to the blissful collective amnesia that renders early childhood a blur of relatives’ faces and bathroom emergencies, most babies sail blithely off toward adulthood, a stage of life when they themselves will start cooing and ooohing and aaahing over babies. Why? Because they have completely repressed what it’s like to be one.

Well, look what the stork just brought: Two-hundred-and-forty-some-odd tots to remind you that babies have a lot more on their minds than where their next baba is coming from. Each photo in this book features a refreshingly churlish cherub. A little devil in diapers. A precious bundle of candor, ingratitude, and…okay, sheer joy.

So, turn the page and watch out for drool. And none of that kitchy-kitchy-koo stuff.
--R.D. Rosen, Harry Pritchett, Rob Battles