I’ve heard people say that prospective parents should get a puppy as a kind of training for having a baby. But that’s crazy. Dogs are nothing like babies. What the prospective parents actually need to get is a fire because fires are just temperamentally more like babies than dogs are. It’s basically science. 

 

If a puppy wakes you up in the night (which isn’t likely because you probably got it a pee mat) all you have to do is kick it outside and wait for like 30 seconds until it is finished doing its business. Then you pet the cute puppy for a minute, because of course, it’s a puppy and who can resist that. Then you go back to bed feeling warm and fuzzy from the happy little puppy. 

 

But if a fire wakes you up in the night (which is likely, because they will die if not fed properly) you will not want to wake up, because since your nose is cold, you know it must be like 50 degrees out there. But you have to get up because you know that the fire needs feeding and that if you don’t feed it now while it still has embers, you’re really going to regret it when you wake up in 3 hours and you turn into an ice pop once you step out of the shower. Fires do not sleep through the night. 

 

Fires need careful feeding just like babies. You can put a bowl of dry food out for dogs but you can’t do that for babies and you can’t do that for fires either (unless you get a pellet stove or strap a bottle to the baby’s head).

 

Contrary to popular belief espoused by people like Smokey the Bear, fires do not start easily. This is because baby fires are actually very picky eaters. Sure, adult fires eat anything but that is because they’re all grown up and can chew anything, so to speak. But baby fires, for example, will not eat food that is too damp. It’s like you have to microwave the bottle for them and get the wood to the precise dryness. They will not eat hardwood; instead, they want a soft wood like pine that is full of pitch, which baby fires love. They will not eat big chunks of wood either. Baby fires literally need their food cut up for them or they will not be able to consume it. Put a big, unspilt log onto a little fire and the fire will be smothered. Big logs actually put out fires; they are baby fire suppressant. It’s true; just try it. It’s like giving steak and a raw potato to an infant. 

 

Instead, you have to carefully split the wood and then you have to cut it into even tinier slices called kindling. Some baby fires are so picky that they won’t even attempt to chew kindling and they wine and smoke until they get paper, yes, paper or dryer lint. Paper is like the fire equivalent of milk and if you really want to take the hassle out of supplying all that milk, you can buy fire sticks or fire starters which are like baby formula for a fire. 

 

So there you are, up at 3:00am, the room is freezing and your numb fingers are fiddling with the kindling just trying to make something that the fire will eat. But the fire is half asleep and angry, it smokes and spits up sparks and crackles angrily as you stoke it and feed it and blow oxygen on it and give it bits of paper and threaten it and prod it to eat. 

 

Finally, after like ten minutes of nursing, the fire is finally settling down to eat. You? You’re smeared with soot and smell funny. But you can’t go to bed yet. Why? Because you can’t close the door on a wood stove until the chimney heats up so you have to wait while the fire eats until it has eaten enough and you can safely close the door or at least kinda close it and damp it down a bit. 

 

This process will have to be repeated every few hours unless you, as a wise caregiver, get the fire on a regular feeding schedule and avoid these meltdowns. 

 

Speaking of meltdowns, sometimes a baby fire will just not behave. As a fire-parent, you can either struggle until the house is full of smoke and show it who’s boss or you can take the easy way out. Lighter fluid is like candy and french fries for fire. They love it and if you offer them a little lighter fluid, the baby fire will immediately fall in line and crackle happily as it eats up the sugar-like fuel. Though this tactic shouldn’t be overused, as the lighter fluid can make the fire a little gassy, it does come in handy for social situations and especially bad nights when you don’t have time or energy to fight with it. 

 

There are innumerable other ways that a fire is like a baby but as my own little fire is getting hungry again, I don’t have time to list them all. I don’t have enough paper either, because of course, the fire needs it. 

 

But in closing I’ll just point out that you can’t really leave a baby fire unattended, though once it’s big enough to feed itself free-ranging parenting kicks in and you can leave for awhile so long as things don’t get out of hand.

 

You also can’t just take it anywhere and if you do, you’ll need a special carry case like a lantern. Just something to think about. 

 

But is a fire really worth it, you ask? Yes, yes it is. Because a fire will not only make you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside it will also actually keep you and your house warm, which is important, because there are more things in your house that will explode when frozen than you might expect.