My brother’s girlfriend came over for Easter dinner on Sunday, and she brought her daughter, who is currently traversing that gap between tween-dom and teen-dom.

And boy, did she love our baby.

I’m not saying that to brag. I’m saying it with a sense of wonder and curiosity. This girl wanted nothing more than to be friends with my 7-month-old son, and my son doesn’t have friends. I’m not sure he even has thoughts. About all he really has these days is a diaper full of dump and an endless supply of drool. But that wasn’t stopping her, and neither were we.

We let her hold him, by which I mean: as soon as she walked in the door, we handed her that baby and started double-fisting drinks. Thank God for naive children who want to amuse the time-and-energy-suck that is a small baby or I’d never have gotten drunk!

And thus the teenager and the baby spent a lot of time together on Easter Sunday.

Unfortunately for the teenager, most of that time – despite her best efforts – consisted of the baby screaming in her face. Sorry kid, shit happens.

Eventually, he warmed up to her. It was either because she fed him (not that way, sickos!) or because she started swinging him around like he was flying (almost exactly like the kid in the picture). The flying thing was all well and good, but I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t sitting there imagining the ways in which I was planning to torture and maim that young girl had she dropped my kid. If you don’t think crucifiction crossed my mind, then you don’t realize how seriously I take Easter.

It’s an odd thing, trying to curry favor with a mush-brained baby. Like I said before, he doesn’t have friends. He has parents, he has relatives, he has caretakers. Hell, even when he has his first friends they won’t even be friends, they’ll just be similarly-aged people that repeatedly hang out in the same general vicinity as him. Or, as I like to call them, coworkers.

Still, that wide-eyed teenager gave it her best and even eventually pulled some laughs from my son’s fat face, which made her happier than an apostle discovering Christ’s empty tomb. Unfortunately for her, as soon as she was out the door, my son completely forgot that she ever existed and we were forced to hand the baby to his grandparents.

Because Mommy and Daddy needed another drink.