Can I let the baby smoke every day or just on holidays?

It's a bad moment during baby care class when one of your classmates reports being dropped on her head as a child and you have to stifle a laugh because you had already guessed something had happened to her.

We went to baby care class Tuesday night. If you have an IQ above a carrot's and are considering a baby care class by these people, get a book and read it. Then take the extra $ leftover from the $20 you would have spent on a baby care class and go to In-n-Out. Have a shake and some good fries.

The directions to the class location were so poor that we walked all the way around the hospital. We found four other couples who were also lost. Finally, a nice hospital educator adopted our pack of preggos (I reminded her of an RN friend of hers) and walked us back to where Mistah C and I parked and said, "That building there." It's called the Administration Building on the directions, but everyone onsite calls it the Orcutt Building. This seems like a minor thing, but when you're asking everyone and their dog for directions to the Administration Building, it's critical. All of us are 15 minutes late.

The instructor greets us at the door with a very friendly, "But I already have everyone on my list, and I don't have enough babies or handouts for you all. And some of you are going to have to stand." None of the women I'm with are in the early stages of pregnancy, so the standing news goes over well. Mistah C and I have been signed up for this class since March. My keen sense of customer service tells me I'm in the hands of a master.

We find places around the corners of the room; thankfully, all the preggos get a seat, although one of the dads is still standing when the dust settles. The instructor (wearing a big oaktag circle that says Sharon) is extremely distressed at having to hand over her example baby doll to a preggo woman. Sharon is about 200 years old and has been teaching this class since before there were babies.

The class consists of watching video tapes from the 80s. They are warped to the point of being almost incomprehensible; the sound is ear-splitting. The one in progress when we enter is about bathing the baby. Some of the advice given in the film is wrong, like swabbing around the base of the cord with rubbing alcohol every time you diaper the baby. All the instructor is there for is to tell us when the film's advice had become outdated.

There's a break not long after we arrive. I get the last packet of info. It's all put together by sponsors - Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente, etc. It's not anything I haven't seen before. We also get a copy of "San Diego Parents" magazine, which is filled with ads for bounce houses and princess parties for our darling child's birthday. During the break, we're supposedly going to "rearrange the room so everyone can fit." Not so much. Mistah C and I spend the rest of the class along the wall under the TV sets. There are 16 couples in the room; each paying $20 a couple. You'd think they could have had enough chairs.

All controversial issues were glossed over or not mentioned. When we got to the "how should baby sleep?" moment, there wasn't even a mention of co-sleeping (or the controversy about co-sleeping). There are no discussions on how used cribs and mattresses are linked to SIDS. When discussing meconium, Sharon says, "They're messy; you might want to let the nurses in the hospital take care of those."

I knew Mistah C was getting a lot out of the class when he put the baby doll's diaper on its head. Then we discussed abandoning the baby for In-n-Out. The Q&A portion of class was insane. People were asking questions like, "If my baby is circumsized, should I use a Brillo pad to clean it?" "If the house is on fire, should I take the baby out first or should I take the baby's crib out first so the baby has a safe place to sleep while the house burns down?"

We were guessing we were among the oldest people in the room and that most of the parents were in their early twenties. Mistah C and I found out 1) where all the stupid people were and 2) that we already knew as much as we were going to know about how to take care of a baby before having one. Edumacated people of America, skip the baby care class for In-n-Out. You will thank me for it.