I just finished a draft of a novel where the heroine has a nine-month-old son, and I feel a little like W.C. Fields–“Never work with children or animals.” Actually, I have lots of animals in my books and they’ve never caused me any trouble. If they’re not needed in a scene you can send them outside or have them fall asleep in the sun. Unfortunately, babies aren’t nearly that accommodating.

Romances require that the hero and heroine spend a lot of time together, sometimes very together. I know from having raised two sons that babies pay no attention to what grown-ups want in the way of alone time. Moreover, babies can’t be plunked down and forgotten–not unless your heroine is a total sleaze (usually not a good idea in a romance). With animals, you sometimes don’t even have to worry about explaining where they are and what they’re doing–readers will accept that they’re taking care of themselves.  But nobody with any sense would accept that with a baby.

I admit–I made things a little easier on myself by making the baby remarkably good-natured and placid. I had a feeling a colicky baby would take care of any romantic possibilities in a split second. Still, he couldn’t be sleeping all the time, which meant that somebody had to be holding him or playing with him, and in many cases that couldn’t be the heroine because she had to be interacting with the hero. I ended up giving her sort of a dream support system–a group of men and women who were only too happy to take the baby off and play with him so the heroine and the hero could have some time together, actually, lots of time together (if only my husband and I had had people like that around when we were raising our own kids).

Making things even more interesting, the hero had a three-year-old daughter of his own. Now, of course, this meant the kids could interact and actually spend some time together.  But it also meant the hero had to spend a certain amount of time taking care of his daughter too. This dream support team could take care of the two of them, but I felt like they were on the verge of turning into something like the shoemaker’s elves (“Oh look, dear, the fairies have arrived to take care of the kids!”).

I managed to finish the draft, but I’m sure when I go through it again I’ll find places where the kids have magically vanished into the woodwork while the adults have meaningful conversations. The moral of all this? In the future, I’m sticking to dogs!