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Yeah Baby

How to Pay for a Baby

Babies are wild expensive, and as they grow into full-fledged dudes and dudettes with wants and desires and susceptibilities to advertising tactics, they only become more expensive.
The author, with his wife and baby.

I'mma keep it 100 with ya'll: I'm doing this column for the yaper. Babies are wild expensive, and as they grow into full-fledged dudes and dudettes with wants and desires and susceptibilities to advertising tactics, they only become more expensive. And child labor laws today make it hella hard for them to get a job until they're like 14 or 15 or some shit. So pretty much it's on you to make sure you got enough yaper to keep the thing alive for that first stretch.

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Now seeing as how you had a baby, most likely you're bad at planning ahead and thinking things through, otherwise you would have been like, "maybe I shouldn't have a baby." But too late doggie, you're in the thick of it now, and that means you need to get your yaper up. Yaper, also known as feddy, bread, guap, clams, smackerinos, legal tender, coinage, etc., is crucial to child rearing. Which sucks, because money is wild fake. Oh, word? You mean to say I hand you all of these worthless tiny pieces of paper and I can walk out your store with hella items? You must be out your damn mind.

That's what money's like.

You made another person who is now, against their will, fully ensconced in this charade along with you, and they have no idea how to do anything, let alone fade on rent.

What's even crazier is that you need money to even live indoors. Like it's hella empty buildings in the world, fully constructed and paid for, yet you still have to perform hella different tasks, collect whatever arbitrary amount of fake ass currency your weak ass country says has some type of innate, legitimate value, and then write another arbitrary ass number on a piece of paper and hand it to some asshole so he doesn't kick you out of a building he "owns" but doesn't live in? Fuck outa here. But that's life, I guess.

Crazier than that, you made another person who is now, against their will, fully ensconced in this charade along with you, and they have no idea how to do anything, let alone fade on rent. Matter of fact they stay shitting themselves so much you gotta buy them disposable pants for every single time they take adump for like two years. That shit adds up.

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More solid parenting advice: What to Do with a Baby

Look into getting a "baby registry," which is basically a sideways ass way of begging all your friends and relatives to buy stuff for your kid, sort of like Kickstarter or GoFundMe or whatever but instead of asking for money to make your stupid movie or shitty album you're asking that people help you keep a tiny human being alive until it's forced to be enslaved by capitalism like the rest of us. Slightly more gravitas there so fools really cake you up.

As far as toys go, no need to wild out. Keep it simple, a couple stuffed animals, a rattle or two, something with blinking lights. We got ours a little electric piano and she stay shredding on that. Books go hard; never too early to start reading to them. They like kids' books but they'll even listen to illuminati conspiracy theories or a Kehlani interview if you read it with some drama and funny voices. Really though, I think a lot of parents go overboard on the toys, and it's not necessary cause I mean anything is a toy to a baby—a pillow, a t-shirt, a plastic cup, a spoon, a newspaper, your keys, a vacuum-sealed pound of weed, 3K in large bills, anything.

But yo, this thing?

A baby will fuck with that thing heavy in those early months when all it wants to do is lie on its back. Hella dangling things, little light-up butterflies, the works. Don't put the music on, though, that shit is garbage. Just the "soothing rainforest sounds," those go hard.

Bottom line is that babies are money pits, and you're gonna need some deep pockets to keep them fed and at least kinda happy. If you're not already stacked, don't sweat it—when you have a kid the hustle sector of your brain expands. Rob a bank, become a professional gambler, sell drugs, learn to code, become a B-list rapper, write a parenting column… Point is you find ways to amplify your yaper capers: you stop binge-ordering Jordans off the internet, you go out less and hooride your sister's Netflix account more… you make it work.

I believe in ya'll. The kids are the future, we can do it, etc.

Follow Kool A.D. on Twitter.

[Editor's note: Don't rob a bank or sell drugs.]