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I was starting to think that Simon just hadn't spent enough time around children to know how very annoying and sticky they are. It doesn't help that my sister has a toddler that is not only superhumanly adorable, but has never once cried in our presence, like she's trying to win a baby interview. This is not normal. I know that if we had a kid it would develop colic by the time it was a blastocyst. It wouldn't even need lungs. I'd just be walking around with screams echoing out of my vagina. He needed to know how bad it would be.

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I started off simple, by switching out his phone's alarm with the sound of a baby crying. Then I set it to go off 10 times a night. Unfortunately, he quickly learned to check before he went to bed. During the day, I made sure that all of our TVs and computers were playing non-stop marathons of Kate Plus 8 and that Duggar show. No matter where he turned, there were reminders of how crappy it would be to end up with enough children to repopulate Wyoming.

Once he started just muting the TV, I knew I had to go a step further. I laid out a line of candy from the street to our open front door and waited. All I needed to do was catch a kid or two and shut them in a room with Simon. It would be like reverse Stockholm Syndrome and he'd break after just a few hours of playing Duck, Duck, Goose and answering the question "why?" seven thousand times. But the children around here must be pretty smart, or still living off their stashes from Halloween, because I didn't get a single taker. I yelled "Look, I have found the Mr. Pikachu!" for an entire afternoon, because I thought that it would send kids in droves to the flypaper I had laid out on the patio. Still, no dice.