While the cat's away, the mice will play

While my friend Daisy’s husband Darren is in Australia buggering up his interview for dental school, Daisy is getting lots of very strange thoughts into her head.

Daisy and Darren have one daughter, but since her birth six years ago, they’ve failed to procure another child, even after utilizing IVF, Clomid, Viagra suppositories and many joints, all to no avail. Daisy finally cut soy milk and wheat out of Darren’s diet, which apparently made his libido come back with a vengeance. But it was too little, too late. They have failed to make a little Darren.

The doctors can’t really find anything wrong with either of them. So while Darren is away, she’s started having odd ideas about going to a nightclub and seducing someone while she’s ovulating and seeing if she can produce a baby. But she’s scared about this option. Not scared of the moral implications of sleeping with someone behind Darren’s back, after all it is for a good cause, providing a sibling for their daughter.

No, she’s worried that the average specimen that can be trawled from one of Baltimore’s premier night spots might not be all up there on the IQ points. Since Darren has it all on paper: a PhD, full head of hair, as well as being an alumni of Cambridge, she’s keen to draw from a similar bank of egg heads. And the problem with men in nightclubs is that they will say practically anything to get you into bed. I mean, they might tell you they have an MBA from Harvard, when really they just have a qualification in plumbing. How on earth do you separate the wheat from the chaff? The last thing she needs is a good looking guy who ends up with having the IQ of a functional retard. She might as well sleep with George W Bush, although he’s hardly good looking. Well, he’s not too bad, I suppose, compared to his mother.

Oh yes, Daisy’s set her heart on her own baby genius. She finds herself surfing the Web looking at strange sites called Egg Heads Donate Sperm and Genius Sperm, where genius’s post their photos and qualifications and you can choose whichever genius you want to father your child. They then send you their genetic material in the post for self-insemination at your own convenience. These sites even give you stats on rates of insemination per sperm donor, and whether the child usually ends up looking more like the father or the mother. So she’s looking at all these photos of geniuses and trying to find one that looks like Darren. And wondering if she should send off for sperm in a bag.

Since Daisy is South American, I said, wouldn’t you be better off hanging around a building site and seducing a Hispanic for a quick game of hide the salami in the Port-o-Potty, or failing that, if you really have got your heart set on a genius, and are worried about your embryo being infected with venereal disease or HIV, how about going to some dreary freshman disco at Johns Hopkins and then popping the cherry of some physics, engineering or math student (so many swotty, four-eyed, pus faced men to choose from, so little time). The advantage is that because 99% of incoming freshmen have never been anywhere near female flesh, they will be sure to ejaculate in seconds. As far as I can tell, it’s a win-win situation.

I’m just trying to be practical. Darren is unemployed, and they can hardly afford to get one of those adorable babies from China for $40,000 a pop. Lest you think I make fun of her too readily, I’ll turn the discussion back around and make fun of myself. It is a little known fact that, at one point, I was even more obsessed with having a baby than Daisy.

It was back when I was twenty-eight. Suddenly I couldn’t look at babies without crying. I wanted one so, so bad. So, okay, I didn’t have a boyfriend, but that wasn’t going to hold me back. No way. So I asked for opinions about what to do. A lot of the suggestions were too disgusting to mention in such a clean and family orientated blog. In the end I just asked all the guys I knew whether they wanted to father a child. I knew them all quite well, I knew their IQ points, good points, bad points, knew essential things that I needed any child of mine to have, practical things like the ability to make cordon bleu meals, play violin to concert standard, drink excessively without having a hangover and not having a small penis. So I asked around these friends for interested parties, and I was actually about to procreate with the violinist, when I started to have doubts about the whole dubious plan. And a few weeks later I met my husband and everything fell into place. I even managed to get pregnant while we were living in separate countries (although we did admittedly meet up occasionally). All I’m saying is that I am not condemning Daisy for her bizarre cravings regarding baby making. I’ve been there.

One day you’ll be able to buy genetic material at Superfresh, but until then, I’ll watch and wait and see whether Daisy ever gets her hand on some genius sperm. One thing that's wierd about this particular genius website is that they send you the vials of sperm for free. They claim it's because a charitable foundation is footing the costs, but who knows who's behind it all? It could just be Dr. Frankenstein himself, trying to fill the world with evil geniuses