Babies are Stupid

From Deadspin:

This is the baby's idea of a game: He keeps trying to throw himself off the couch, headfirst. It's completely intentional. I sit him upright, and he looks me in the eye, holds my gaze, grins—and then pitches over sideways. I grab him, reel him back in, and straighten him up, and he grins again and takes another dive.

[snip]

I had forgotten how incredibly stupid babies are, over the four years since we'd last had one. The previous baby had become a child, a wholly recognizable human being, someone you could have a conversation with. ("I gotta pee," he says. "So go pee," I say. And he goes to the bathroom and pees.) This ability to communicate seemed, when we didn't think very hard about it, to have been there all along. We had always understood each other, child and parents. We'd gotten more fluent about it over time, was all. His infancy, in retrospect, was a puzzle we had all solved, working together.

[snip]

But then this baby arrived, and he was much, much stupider than that. His brother was born weeks early, tiny and puny, and so it had made sense that it took him a while to be able to do anything. But this one was a full-term baby, a sturdy eight-pounder, and he was unbelievably ignorant and helpless. He knew nothing, understood nothing. He was soft and warm, he had that going for him. His eyes were big and bright; his head was a handsome shape. And yet behind those eyes, or inside that head—a roaring void. For weeks, his mind consisted of one thought: "NIPPLE...? NIPPLE...? NIPPLE...?" I would hold him and he would nuzzle at me, blindly, trying to drink from my collarbone. He would bang his face against my chest over and over, with as much affection as a moth has for a windowpane.

Read the whole thing.