Morris tribune., 1881-02-03
ABOUT BABIES.
A Retaliation Of the "Well-Spring Of Pleasure
---- lilaa ~

A Retaliation Of the "Well-Spring Of Pleasure
Idea.
Some idiot has said that baby in the
house is a well -spring of pleasure. Well bet
he never hada baby. A baby may be we'll
spring of pleasure; but if that is fact it
has never been made patent to us. We
have three Of 'em ut home, and the result
is our house is sort of Bedlam. If they
amt fighting and pulling each others hair
they are crying for a ''piece." Occasionally
this is varied by one Of them falling down
stairs. The falling down stairs racket is
highly exciting and peculiarly thrilling to a
nervous man. 1t takes fellow long time
to get used to it, but we would say to those
unsophisticated couples who are rearing
their first babies that no kid ever gets hurt
by falling down stairs. They've got to fall
down stairs fifteen or twenty times, Just as
they have got to go through the measles and
whooping cough. When cur baby first got
in the habit Of tumbling down stairs it
scared us; we thought a thing like that
would smash it all up, and we used to skir-
mish around to drug stores to get IMMINENT
and things to put on it. Now, when one of
our babies performs this act we generally
lick it or give it cent, according to which
best suits its disposition, but we have never
10y "oA~oP1An6 VI PiCooelo LII UhIis SoI Y
of thing.
All we want to do in this brief article is
to make well spring of pleasure man out a
liar. We won't go into that stereotyped sto-
ry about fellow getting out of bed on a
cold winter night and trotting up and down
the re ON with the baby when it has the COL
ic, and running tacks in his feet, and fool
ing with the paregoric bottle, because we
believe that any man who is not an idiot
never did that except on the occasion of the
first baby. After the first one man lets
his wife shoulder the responsibility and
he by at the same time. 1t devolves up
on her then to trot up and down with the
baby and look whether there are pins stick
ing into it, and give it doses Of catnip tea
and soothing strip. If the father is of a
phlegmatic disposition he goes into sort
of nightmareish sleep, and if he is nervous
he founders around the bed and swears,
and we think our readers will bear us out
when we say there isn't much of we'll
spring of pleasure in this.
Then as time rolls on the babies get older
and they also get the measles, and all sorts
of infantile diseases, and in addition to this
the boys fall off bake-ovens and board piles
and break their arms and legs, and the girls
get sand thrown into their eyes and fall in
to coal holes and get lost. The old man,
instead of getting new overcoat, saves his
money to buy cough syrup and pay doctor
bills, and when he finds his nose brought to
the grind-stone in this manner he is apt to
wonder whether the well-spring man is a
myth or not, and is liable to believe that he
is.
But we suppose what is, is right. The
world wouldn't amount to much if there
were no babies. There is nothing mean
about us. We are willing to wrestle with
the babies, and feed them, and cloth them,
and educate them, and bring them up in the
way they should go, and then see them
meander off in the way they shouldn't CO.;
but what we kick on is the offspring idea
and we repeat that the man that got off that
remark never was proprietor of a baby.