NEWS: Baby Be of Use

CULTURE: Baby Be of Use

Sick of babies not being useful as they sit there and drool and develop mentally while lazily sleeping the days away? Check out Lisa Brown's series of Baby Be of Use books including titles such as Baby Make Me Breakfast, Baby Mix Me a Drink, Baby Fix My Car and Baby Do My Banking. The books are published by McSweeney's in the classic baby board book format, and are delightfully illustrated by the author cover-to-cover. Pick up copies for all your expectant friends and their useless babies here.


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I dunno, that sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

Damn lazy babies

Get a job !!

I saw an ad for a program that would show moms how to use their infants as workout weights. It was pretty funny.

if by 'workout weights' you mean shot put...

then yes, that sounds even better than babies making martinis.

Lisa Brown is hilarious. I found this article the New York Post did on her recently:

New York Post
"A Tip of the Glass for Child Labor"
By Mandy Stadtmiller

August 10, 2006

Teach your toddler how to fix you a martini, make you a hangover-cure breakfast, change the oil in your car and apply for a home equity loan.

Sound too good to be true?

Not to illustrator and humorist Lisa Brown, whose two latest additions ("Baby Fix My Car" and "Baby Do My Banking") to the four-book "Baby Be of Use" series came out this summer and are available together for $24 at mcsweeneys.net.

Sitting in her office in San Francisco, the 34-year-old author says she was frustrated by the dearth of educational children's books on the market.

"I had been reading all of these sappy board books," says Brown, who is mother to a 2 1/2-year-old, "and my son is learning how to say goodnight to the moon and pat a bunny, but nothing really interesting to me."

So Brown asked herself, what interests me? Cocktails! "Baby Mix Me a Drink" was born.

"They have really nice pleasing shapes and colors," she laughs, "and I thought, perfect, he can read about cocktails and I can enjoy cocktails."

Full of future ideas including "Baby Administer CPR" and the possibly more controversial "Baby Get Me Laid," Brown says she has only received a small amount of criticism from the sense-of-humor-challenged.

"I was at an event in Kansas," she recalls, "and I had this parent ask me, 'Are you afraid of sending mixed messages?'

"I said, 'I don't think the message is mixed at all. It's pro-cocktail.'"

Strangely, the other women who work in my preschool didn't find this funny at all.
But the parents laughed...

Well, if babies weren't so goddamn useless! I mean, what good are they for? They crawl, they drool, they cry, they poop. If you can toss "fix my car" in there, I say good deal.

i am soooo tempted to order these for my library.