Ugh, babies.

Pretty much, I've discovered that I like my kids a lot more now that they aren't babies anymore.

For years, my house was filled with babies and baby paraphenelia. It is a thing of the past. We no longer have to shell out a small fortune on diapers, we have beds instead of cribs and I couldn't find a bottle and/or sippy cup in my house if my life depended on it.

And it's so much better. Babies suck.

I have never been a baby person. A lot of people crumple up into a big wad of "OH my gosh he's so cute can I hold him blah blah blah" when they see a baby. Not me. I would just kind of say Hi to babies, and then they would just look back at me like I was an idiot.

When I was a teenager, I always told myself that I wouldn't have any kids after the age of 30. If I was going to be a mom, I would be a young mom. I think I also kind of made this little deal with myself thinking that there was absolutely no chance I'd find any sort of husband/potential baby daddy material before 30 and therefore I'd be off the hook, reproductively speaking.

But I got married at 22, and actually---to my great surprise---caught baby fever. Again, it wasn't at all about BABIES, but I liked the idea of having kids and adult children who will (theoretically) take care of me when I'm a haggardly old crone (meaning in about 5.7 years)

So we had babies, lots of 'em, and I did like the little buggers, despite everything they did to try to convince me otherwise. Babies can puke on you, have explosive diarrhea on you, drool, bite your nipples, keep you awake all night, pee all over the place, try to choke themselves on any household item, and all ranges of unpleasant things, but I still liked them. Enough to not sell them on the baby black market anyway.

But as much as I liked them as babies, I like them WAY more now.

Pretty much, I throw them some food, and make sure they don't kill each other, and we're good to go. The manual labor years of babyhood are gone. They dress themselves, take care of the bathroom business on their own, and know what they like to do. We pretty much can hang out now. I can have some great conversations with them.

But the number one reason why they're so much better now is because they are freaking hilarious guys. Babies are funny too, but it's like accidentally funny. They don't realize they're being funny when they try to kiss the dog's butt, so when you laugh, you almost kind of feel like you're making fun of their baby stupidity. But as they get older, it becomes a case of laughing with them rather than laughing at them.

You may have noticed that siblings often share the same sense of humor. They might dress differently, or have different careers, or political persuasions or whatever, but generally siblings find the same type of stuff funny. It's that way because the parents get to completely mold their kids into having their exact sense of humor.

Here's how it works. Kids are like stand up comedians. They try out their comedy material on their audience--the parents---and sometimes it flops and other times it gets a big laugh. And kids are a sucker for a big laugh. So they chase that audience reaction by going with the stuff that works, and by the time they're 5, you have your own personal court jester who knows what makes you laugh. My kids can turn me on a dime from screaming at the top of my lungs in anger to laughing my ass off. They know how to work the crowd, meaning me. Hence their sense of humor is molded to fit mine and that makes them fun to hang out with.

Kids are so much better than babies. I am SO glad my baby days are behind me. People still ask if I want more kids, which always shocks me because seriously, I had 3 kids in 24 months. Who would go back for more after that? But they ask anyway but quickly wish they hadn't because my answer usually has something to do with how my husband had a vasectomy and nothing shuts people up like hearing you talk about your husband's nutsack.

People always told me that once I had babies, I'd like other people's babies more. Not true. I still don't get all coochie-coochie-coo with babies. I don't want to hold them. It gives me flashbacks. Plus, because I spent so much time holding two babies at a time, when i hold just one I'm probably too casual and it freaks parents out to see me fling their babies around. So I don't want to hold babies, and parents don't want me to hold their babies and that's how it's going to be.