But my most recent stroke of genius came to me rather recently. To introduce my new idea, I first need to issue a formal apology. To anyone out there with a child roughly as old as Elliott or younger, I am sorry if I ever talked about any milestones Elliott may be hitting at any point. Truly. Deeply. Sorry. I know that it drives me nuts when a baby who is slightly younger than Elliott is doing something that he isn't yet. I don't want to hear about it. It makes me paranoid and a little jealous. 

OK, so now that the unpleasantness is out of the way, let me segue into my brainstorm. I want to start up dumb_babies.com. Basically it's a site where people would submit stories about how their kids turned out perfectly fine after their children missed particular milestones by months and months. 

"My son is currently a rocket scientist with NASA and he didn't talk until he was 3!"

"My daughter is the D.A. for the state of Arizona and she didn't walk until preschool!"

"My son is a college professor and to this day he STILL can't roll over!"

"My son has no discernible sense of morality and he's an NFL quarterback!"

You get the idea. And believe me, there is nothing currently on the internet like this whatsoever. I'd even make up a few stories just to pad the stats a bit and reassure parents. 

The point is that parents need to have dumb babies around them to make them feel better about themselves and their lazy babies. My goal once Elliott begins attending school is to immediately scan his classmates. Then, once I spot the kid who is sucking on a bottle of Elmer's glue and staring directly into the halogen lights, I will immediately befriend his or her parents. That way we can always say "Well, we may need to pin Elliott's mittens to his jacket but at least he's not like that Worthington kid." 

And if all of your friends' babies are more proactive than yours, there should be somewhere for parents to go to realize that there are babies out there dumber than their own. There are plenty of places to go to make you feel like you're doing something wrong . There needs to be at least one place that makes you feel comparatively superior to others. Dumb_babies.com.