Come on, who doesn't like babies?

A few of my cousins have had babies before. Well, just two, I guess, on one side.

But this ... this, my friends, was the first Niese cousin baby born. This was the first cousin who I was fairly close to, because on that side of the family, there are only 10 of us, instead of 30-plus on the other side. We're all close, in a weird, would-make-a-good-Lifetime-movie kind of way.

This morning, my cousin Jennie gave birth to a baby with three first names. Whoa. That's a lot of first names (only the last one is actually his last name, it just so happens to be a first name to 99 percent of the English-speaking world). A lot of first names for a lot of baby: that sucker was 9 pounds. Eek. I sat and cried about that and then swore I'd just adopt or something. My god. Also, I hope to never use the phrase "gave birth" in another blog, unless I'm making fun of someone: "So and So gave birth to the spawn of (Satan, etc.)," for example.

Anyhow, all unpleasantries aside, this is weird. I mean, I've seen the kid, so it's kind of "real" to me. He's cute. He's a newborn. He may have been 9 pounds, but he's still tiny to me. He was about .75 inches tall when I saw him on my cell phone in a picture message, actually. The unreal part is that my cousin is about a year older than I am.

She was always the one my other cousin, Kristin, and I would look up to, to ask questions. Now she's got a baby. Now she's a mom. I don't quite know how to handle this. But I do believe I've exceeded my self-imposed once-a-day limit of using the phrase "awww," so I should probably leave well enough alone now and just move on to talking about insignificant things, like celebrity break-ups, or that dull article in Elle this month on Robert Kennedy Jr., which I read just because I think he's hot. Awww.

OK. That's it. ENOUGH.

(Photo: Not really the three-named child. He's just some random baby from -- and I'm not making this address up -- www.pregnancy-leads-to-new-babies.com.)