When I was growing a human for the second time, I realized I had no recollection of how to take care of a baby.

This is because of the thing that happens where when you live alongside someone, you forget what they looked like when you met and you remember them as how you know them now as how you knew them always. I stare at pictures of Iris as a young human, and I oftentimes don’t remember her ever looking so small and wobbly. What I remember are her oversized eyeballs and massive smile and the feeling of holding her hand at night.

I remember thinking, “Parents who give advice have no more clue what they are doing than me, why are people telling me anything?”. A few years removed from my surly mid-twenties, I am more receptive to small talk about baby humans, birthing baby humans, feeding baby humans, not because I want the advice or need to give the advice, but because I am more receptive to another human wanting to not be a jerk to me and me not wanting to be a jerk to them and it is OKAY that all we can tie up between us is the commonality that we were both once babies and now we both have babies.

(I think the other small-talker just relates to me on the second fact. Whenever someone says, “I love this age so much!,” I always respond with, “Oh, what do you remember about being three months old?” and no one has taken the bait yet and most people won’t even get that I was inquiring about their own infancy, but one day someone will respond perfectly and we will look into each others’ souls and be best parent friends forever)

Where is this all going?

I have a 6-month-old, and I LOVE BEING 6 MONTHS OLD SO MUCH. Fact: Whatever age your kids are is the age you are. I drool a lot, I have tooth pain, I rolled off the bed last week and my language is incoherent all of the time.

A few months ago, I made the mistake of looking at some click-baity parenting site about what my kid was supposed to be doing at 3MO, as though reading this crap would somehow elevate my own life by me being able to translate my kid’s skills into my own parenting letter grade, and instead I felt outraged. MY KID SHOULD BE LAUGHING!?

Wait, my outrage didn’t develop from a click-baity website. It came from some useless information I learned in a theatre history class about how Aristotle believed ensoulment happened approximately 40 days after birth when your kid laughs the first time. My kid wasn’t smiling. I wasn’t smiling. I mean, he probably was smiling. But he wasn’t smiling like an insane baby the way Iris smiled at a month old. He got to three months old and I still thought he was soulless and then went wandering for click-baity articles. After I read them and gave up on my own self-worth, I wrote this piece about jobs you can give your 3-month-old. That book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, really taught me all I still need to know in life: that I can’t control the checklist on sponsored Pampers posts, but I can wrangle myself all I want and call it proactivity.

In the middle of 4 months, my kid started sitting up by himself, I think because Iris likes to shake him a lot and he needed to develop abs fast. Two weeks ago, my kid started falling off the bed on the regular. Yesterday, he started clapping and scooting around NOT using his face as a limb and today he continued the clapping and he learned how to crawl. He is cutting his upper central incisors, for a total of 4 teeth at 6 months, and he says yayayayaya mamam aahgahhhhhhhhhh!! at night, writhing around and sitting up and pivoting and flopping and sitting up and pivoting and flopping like he is a spirograph until he finally yells himself to sleep and probably dreams about being hugged by Iris because he eeks out sad sounds an awful lot. That’s what Felix is doing for himself.

What am I facilitating these days?

Jobs to Give Your 6-Month-Old:

1. Let them hold your important things, like your phone and your wallet. Or don’t because that’s high-risk behavior and it’s going to lead to an embezzling toddler and a broken phone screen. I like to let him hold my wallet when we are checking out at stores now because there’s no better time to start learning about financial literacy than as soon as you can understand the word “milkies”. It’s close enough to “money” for comprehension, right?

2. Let them hold unimportant things like crinkly trash, and supervise them tasting the safer crinkly trashes. Don’t rip stuff out of their hands unless it is a choking-sized item. Felix occupied himself chewing on a paper plate for about twenty minutes at dinner yesterday. Today, Iris flipped out and swiped a piece of trash from his hands and in the midst of darting his bulging, confused eyeballs I swiped that trash out of her hands and handed it back to him and calmly talked to him and her both about it and let him crunch on it before he realized it was gross and then I tossed it in the trash. Their job here is risk-taker, and you are handling oversight of their position.

3. Self-recognition time. Your kid might recognize their goofy round head in the mirror and once they do, it’s hilarious to walk them towards the mirror and pretend you are going to throw them at themselves. Felix likes this game, anyway. I like this game it makes me giggle. We both are six months old these days, remember?

4. Bring on the music! Give your kid an instrument if you haven’t been handing them one since birth. My kid likes smacking the table, his legs, my body, to the beat of songs. He likes finding objects that make the smacking louder. He LOVES swatting piano keys and listening to Iris sing to him and me play guitar. Can’t play any instruments?

   First, turn this on and see if it does the trick.

   Then, Turn on Spotify and learn what else your baby responds well to and in like, three years, Spotify will know your baby so well they will be able to curate a throwback playlist featuring all of their favorite jams like “La Inconforme” by Massore (click above), Sleater-Kinney’s “Modern Girl,” America’s “Horse With No Name,” and Bowie’s “Changes” and maybe they’ll even know you listened that one Adele song that you’d think would be totally out of the algorithm but lo, there it is on your kid’s mix.

5. Help them start understanding boundaries by gently saying, “No” and putting them down instead of laughing when they hurt you. Nipple biting can be resolved with your natural yelp of pain and setting them down repeatedly until that torture ends after a week of accidental and intentional biting and if your kid laughs, you filtered your yell too much and now your 6-month-old will wield all the power good luck reversing that. If you really screamed and put your kid down and they laughed instead of getting scared: shit. Good luck with that, too.

Iris asks me frequently at what age she learned how to do certain things, but I never wrote milestones down so I can’t tell her the exact day in her life she first stared in amazement at her own hands. I don’t know when Felix started doing that either, but it was a delight to watch him realize he was the one who had been punching himself in the head all along while Iris repeated “stop hitting yourself!”.

What is/are your kid/s up to these days? How old are they? What are their jobs?