The small ones, mainly. They have these big eyes and their skin is stretched amphibiously over the tiniest version of hands and arms and feet you’ve ever seen.

This according to my partner, who is a baby doctor. That means he’s a qualified doctor but he’s not a grown up doctor yet. Also he is currently looking after babies. Some of them look like frogs for the reasons I have outlined above.

When I was a baby, I didn’t look like a frog. 

I asked my mum. I was 10 pounds and some ounces before I grew up and started to use the metric system. Everyone else had cute little babies, said Mum. I had a football. I had to lug you around.

Should’ve returned me then, I said. It’s probably not that hard to swap. 

If you work at a hospital you have to get emails about infant feeding training. Which either means feeding babies food or feeding babies as food but they don’t clarify this in the subject line. You’d think they would.

The SCA makes you talk about babies more than you want to. Most of the time because you have to kill your babies. But the reality is that most people don’t kill their babies, they just say the phrase a lot because it’s unconventional and shocking. 

I wouldn’t kill a frog baby personally. Maybe the baby of a frog. But if you kill a real baby it’s a crime. So you have to lug them around. If you have one. Not a frog one though. They just sit in your hand and ribbit. 

When you add the word book crit into your SCAB then you have proved you are writing a legitimate series of words about advertising. 

Book crits are kind of like going to see adult frogs and kissing them to find out which one is the frog you want to work at. Or something. Sometimes you have to write a simile down in order to work out whether or not it makes any sense. When you are kissing your adult job frog they will sometimes advise you on which babies to kill. If you go to enough book crits then your babies just statistically shouldn’t change at all. 

Which is to say that when you go to a crit you should listen but the people critting you will tell you not to listen if you don’t want to. And when you’ve done two or three in a week then you’re sort of in the same spot you were before anyway and maybe you should just kill the squeezy cheese baby because you’re tired of talking about whether the word ‘squeezeboard’ is a legitimate way to strengthen the grip of late-stage capitalism on our society.

I don’t think frogs of any age can eat cheese. And I’ve never really met any babies. Certainly not the tiny ones. I did meet one that a friend of mine had produced. He’s huge, she told me. You wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley.

Don’t worry, I said. It’s the frogs you have to look out for.

@hopewritehead