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Babies hate my guts. That's what I was thinking as my girlfriend (er . . . fiancée) Barbara and I watched my seven-month-old niece Jane E. Frazier two Sundays ago. My sister had gone out for a few hours, leaving the infant in our care. For a while, Jane E. Frazier, honked off that her mom had left, cried and looked at me like everything was my fault.

I don't know nothing about baby-sitting babies. It's a good thing Barbara was around, because that baby would still be crying if I'd been there by myself. She'd be crying through adolescence and into college. I never would have thought of turning down the sound on the TV and putting on soothing music, as Barbara did. I would have continued to sit on the sofa, waving my arms around and going "woo woo" to calm her down. What a waste of time. The baby had no interest in my tepid riffs. What's seeing some guy bounce around on a couch making stupid noises, compared to nursing on a mother's soft breast? If I was a baby, I'd think, "There's no comparison." I'm just glad Barbara came up with the music idea.

After awhile, the baby began rocking back and forth on all fours to the music, saying "Guy guy guy dai dai dai guy guy guy." This was all right. There was nothing to this. Put on some tunes and you'll have no problem with babies. But then we discovered the baby had gone to the lavatory in her diaper. Barbara cleaned her up and changed her, while I held her feet up and almost gagged. Earlier, I had in actuality gagged after touching the baby's gummed and wet Stella Doro cookie fragments. The baby was going "Huh huh huh hee hee hee hah hah hah." Then, when we threw the used diaper aside, the cat Dizzy sniffed it and looked up at us with her eyes crossed and her mouth ajar. I had to shake my head at the entire business.

During the last hour of our baby-sitting experience, nothing much happened. We put some old Ethel Merman music on the boombox and Jane Frazier went "Aaahhhhh aahh huh huh hunh." I was going to rub the baby with my Pollenex electric massager, but Barbara didn't think it was a good idea. I did touch her leg with the Pollenex on "low," and she did look surprised, but hardly electrocuted as Barbara had feared. I wasn't totally comfortable with using the device on the baby anyway. None of the pictures on the Pollenex box showed babies being massaged; just guys with mustaches with cricks in their necks or old folks with arthritis. However, there were no specific warnings: Not to be rubbed on babies' arms or legs.

I also idly wondered in the waning baby-sitting moments if I should draw a couple of crossed daggers and snakes and the legend "Born to Raise Hell" on Jane Frazier's arm with a felt tip pen, then tell my sister we took the baby out to be tattooed. I don't know if new mothers go for that kind of gag, even though my sister, a Cleveland cop, probably has lots of friends on the force with tattoos. Maybe she would have thought it was a great idea-who knows? But I would imagine most moms would like to be present when their babies get tattooed.

When my sister returned, Jane Frazier was going "Bah bah bah bah bah". My sister scooped up Jane Frazier, thanked us, and left. Barbara and I congratulated ourselves on a job well done, and I myself slept like a baby that night.

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