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deliver the baby. We mean the Sigourney Weaver-fighting kind (whose infamous chest bursting birth scene, incidental y, is the only thing most expectant fathers have to prepare them for the act of childbirth).
    As it turns out, babies’ heads are soft and don’t become hard until months or years after they’re born. This explains why you don’t usually see them at col ege parties, crushing beer cans with their foreheads.
    Either way, having a soft skul comes in handy when you’re trying to be born without kil ing your mother in the process. Unfortunately, their heads don’t instantly regain their shape once they pop out, so your offspring will spend a day or two looking like a misshapen blob of ugly before you can safely take it out in public to go hat shopping.
    2. THE FETAL MONITORING
    If the doctor feels that your baby is at risk of anything (juvenile diabetes, low birth weight, high birth weight, medium birth weight), or if he just feels that he can charge you more, he may elect to hook up a fetal monitor. That doesn’t sound so bad, right? well, that’s because fetal monitor is a nice way of saying “a twisted metal thingy with wires coming out of it that we’re going to screw directly into your unborn baby’s head.”
    Now, the fetal monitor itself isn’t all that scary looking. But the fact that they jam it into the baby’s soft spot while he or she is still in the womb, and leave it inside the skul until after the baby comes out, should bring back vivid memories of when that baby gets hooked up to the Matrix in the first movie.
    Couple that with the fact that a baby’s heart slows way down during every contraction, which sets off a little alarm on the monitor similar to the one that goes off when a patient flatlines on Scrubs , and you may find that you have shit your pants before the kid is even out. Don’t feel bad though. Like we said, there is a lot of pooping going on at this point, so if you do let one slide, just motion toward the mother when she isn’t looking and plug your nose as if to say, “Yeah, I smel it too. It was her.”
    1. THE BILL
    Births are really expensive. Even a complication-free birth is likely to cost upward of ten thousand dol ars, and if your baby comes out and so much as sneezes in the delivery room, this number is likely to start rol ing up like a pinbal score. Sure, maybe you’re one of those fancy-pants families with “health insurance.” But tack on the cost of the car seats, baby clothes, toys, diapers, bottles, playpens, and some placenta-memory-erasing Belgian ale, and you can plan on having spent the equivalent of a new car before you set foot outside the hospital.
    So basically you let a strange man touch your (wife’s) private parts, write him a check, watch him speed away in a Lexus, and then spend the next three months telling everyone what a miracle the whole thing was. Congratulations!

FIVE FUN THINGS THAT WILL KILL YOU
    YOU know what’s fun? Fun. We spend bil ions of dol ars a year on products and activities that serve no purpose other than distracting us from the soul-crushing daily grind for a few precious moments before we have to get back to the miserable office. But many of the things we do to lighten up the misery of our monotonous lives have the potential to end them in startling ways.
    5. OWNING A SWIMMING POOL
    There are approximately 7 mil ion private swimming pools in America today, which is proof that sometimes the simplest ideas—digging a hole in your backyard and fil ing it with water—are the best. We’l get the obvious out of the way first: Water can drown you. An estimated 350 kids drown in backyard swimming pools every year.
    Drowning in a swimming pool is the second leading cause of death in children under twelve in the United States, and, statistically speaking, having one in your backyard is more dangerous than having a gun in your house. But the danger isn’t even limited to drowning: That’s just the surface of the pool’s