Today's daddy tip

Every "new parents book" out there advises parents to "narrate" their day with their babies -- "Now Daddy is putting away the groceries," "Now Daddy is warming up your bottle," "Now Daddy is wiping your dirty ass," stuff like that.

Supposedly the purpose of this exercise is to develop the baby's language skills -- but as every stay-at-home parent knows, you're actually driven to recite every mundane detail of your day because you run out of anything new to say to the kid about 72 hours after you bring them home from the hospital.

To make sure he hears lots of voices despite the lack of witty repartee around here, I stream NPR and the BBC whenever we're in the kitchen. So I'm sure his first words will be "I'm Theodore, with these news headlines," in a British accent.

But what to do when you're ready to shoot the computer rather than listen to one more second of "Why Hillary won New Hampshire: A full hour of theories yanked from some reporter's butt?"

You could go back to just recording the day's events in your overenthusiastic "Talking to the baby" voice. This strategy has unfortunate side-effects, like the near certainty that you'll forget where you're at, and start talking to other adults in the same voice. "Are we gonna approve my mortgage? Of course we are! That's a good little banker!" If you're lucky, you only get a few strange looks, rather than charges filed against you.

So my strategy for mixing things up -- impersonations. Folks my age already resort to reciting favorite lines from TV shows when we run out of anything original to talk about -- I'm just giving the kid an early start. Even if you're lousy at impersonations, you can't be any more annoying than that Caliendo guy that FOX was trying to talk me into finding funny last year.

Babies love singing, so give them a little Sinatra or Elvis. My favorite right now is Robert Goulet (RIP). Although I don't remember when I actually last heard Goulet sing, so I'm probably impersonating Will Ferrell impersonating Robert Goulet. But as long as the kid is smiling, I figure I'm good.

I have a kitchen full of dirty dishes, so I'll just wrap up with a video of Phil Hartman doing Sinatra, and we'll all just pretend this wasn't bourbon-fueled stream-of-consciousness and I had a real ending to this post hidden somewhere...