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MEET THE NIERATKOS: WE KNOW WHAT GIRLS LIKE

My prison cell

We're hoping that our next baby is a girl. I figured who knows what girls like more than me? No man alive has a better understanding of the needs of women. As we begin to prepare our house for Christopher III (the name we've chosen regardless of whether we have a boy or girl) I've noticed a real lack of clever girl bedding.

So my wang put another human in my wife's front butt. I'm not sure if I already told you that. Because our house is so small it means that the bedroom I was occupying with my office has to be converted into Christopher II's bedroom and Christopher II's old room is going to serve as Christopher III's new room. And where does Christopher I end up? I've been banished to the storage room in the basement right beside the water meter, hot water heater and extra boxes of Stove Top Stuffing, Kind Bars, and garbage bags. My view of the green, green grass of home has been replaced by a plain white cinder block wall; my own personal prison cell.

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(Side note: My cousin Mike corrected me yesterday and said, "They're not cinder blocks. They're called CMUs. Concrete Masonry Units." I said, "Since when?")

My wife ultimately decided on Liquid Sky Blue for Christopher II's new room. It's like permanent daytime. My poor son is never going to sleep because we've made our own sun and now he has 24 hours of sunlight in his room. It's a great way to nurture any meth interests he might have.

In two weeks we'll find out if we're having a boy or girl and decide if Christopher III's room is going to be pink or some other not-pink color. Yesterday my wife picked up some gag sex-determining test at Babies R Us so we could guess what we were having. She captured her first piss of the day in a turkey baster and shot it into a cup full of what I can only guess is dirt since neither the packaging or instructions told us what the "secret potion" was made of. My wife did this in the most sanitary area of our home: on our kitchen counter, right beside our bread and coffee pot. They must have filled our jar with brown dirt and not white dirt because as soon as she dumped her urine in it turned dark brown and dark brown equals a boy. "We have to wait five minutes now," she said. In the following five minutes it didn't turn any more or any less brown. "That was stupid," I said. "How much was that?" I assumed it couldn't have been more than a dollar or two. Then I was reminded it's not 1970 and nothing is a dollar or two. "Twenty bucks," my wife told me. "We just paid $20 to find out we're having a black baby boy? Awesome."

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I didn't care what the dirt said; I'm having a girl. Knowing that, I began looking at possible future bedding for my daughter, Christopher III. We also need to buy a big boy bed for Christopher II. He was easy; they have all sorts of cool beds for boys. Beds that look like racecars or gas guzzling Hummers. Dragon beds and puppy dog shaped beds. One was in the shape of a bear and you slept in its belly, which I thought was an awful lesson to teach kids: It's fun to be eaten by a bear.

Website after website was full of boys beds but nothing for girls. I got to thinking, "I know what girls like, why don't I come up with my own girl's bed design and mass produce them and get rich?" What do little girls love more than anything? They love to play dress up and pretend like they are all grown up. And what's more grown up for girls than feminine hygiene?

So I came up with the Tampon Bed. This is just a mock up, obviously it'll be made with only the nicest oak but you get the idea. It's a wooden tube like an MRI machine that a girl slides into and instead of a mattress it'll have a soft bed of cotton (available in red or white). Genius, right?

You'd be surprised just how many areas of child merchandising are overlooked. I know, when you see these new color LCD baby monitors that can now record Quicktimes of your child sleeping (Creepy.) you can't help but say, "They've thunk of everything."

But they haven't. There is not one book on the market about shitting your pants. There are books on potty training and how to use the toilet and all sorts of cutesy sentiments but there isn't a book whose underlying message is, "Dude! You shit your pants! What the fuck? Why?" So I'm working on that too.

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I'm also working on a baby death rattle because I see how the kid looks at me sometimes and I know Stewie from Family Guy has to be based on something and my kid's eyes often tell me he wants me dead. Now I'm perfecting an evil sounding rattle that makes my son feel like he's killing me when he shakes it.

I also want to combine a squeaky duck and a pacifier so the pacifier squeaks whenever the kid bites down on it. Annoying? Totally. Hilarious? Absolutely.

On a side note, I'm starting a petition to outlaw these butthole pacifiers. Every time I see one in my kid's mouth I think of really explicit anal pornography. Whoever came up with those things is a real pervert.

On a somber note, Tuesday, March 1, 2011 marks 8 years since my good friend, Chris Marshall, passed away. He never got to meet Christopher II nor the impending Christopher III and possible Christopher IV & Vs. There has been a hole in my heart ever since he passed that I know will never be filled. I miss him dearly.

Here's a couple photos I came across of him. That one is not a before-&-after photo of him seated beside himself. That's Chris & Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P.

[audio: http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/blogs/en/files/2011/02/01-track-01.mp3]

And here's one of the few tracks he recorded with his band, Horsy.

Be easy, my friend.

CHRIS NIERATKO