As proud parents of an adorable newborn, I’m finding that he seems to get a lot of unwanted attention. For example:
“He’s sooo adorable!! I could just snatch him up!!”
“Oooo! I could just take him home with me!”
“He would make a welcome addition to my collection.”
I know you mean well, but please stop threatening to kidnap my baby.
“He’s so cute! How old is he?”
He’s 42 same as me. He’s my twin brother who suffers from Benjamin Button Syndrome. That’s actually his wife, not mine. They met in the middle when they were like 25. Well I hope he does grow up to be a smart-ass like his dad.
“AYYY!! Little Bambino! Howa old?!!”
Thanks weird senile old Italian guy who hangs out in front of Dunkin Donuts every weekend. He’s about a week older than when you met him last Sunday and two weeks older than when you met him the Sunday before that. As I keep telling you, I don’t know. He’s baby age. I didn’t ask his mom. Yes, I hope he does grow up-a to be a smart-ass like-a his dad.
“Are you his dad?”
No. It’s more of a Hodor relationship. He’s the brains and heir to the family fortune and I’m just some retard who carts him around all day.
Any parents of adorable babies have similar problems?
For some reason I can’t fathom, people are obsessed with how much the goddam baby weighed at birth. “Ooooooh, 7 pounds 3 ounces! That’s fucking fascinating!”
I guess once you get past the “The baby was born with no major complications” discussion you have to scrape the barrel to find something else to say. But her fucking birthweight? That’s a topic?
Yes. Sometimes I kind of like the attention because I feel good for having produced such and adorable with my body. However, people sometimes cross the line. For example, we took Baby Girl to dinner at Outback for Husband’s birthday. The hostess touched my baby, exclaiming how cute she was. I was carrying Baby Girl in a mei tai so I wasn’t too worried she could take my baby and run off. Still, dude, don’t touch strange people’s babies.
That’s one thing you’d never need to worry about if we ever met,I raised my 3… However,I think the age thing is to compare your child to theirs,to see if all are on track
I promise I won’t touch your baby, slobber all over it and threaten to snatch it if you promise not to parade around with it, practically shoving it in my face.
Yes, I’m female. Yes I’m old enough to be a grandmother. No, I don’t like babies. I don’t hate them, I just am no more incline to coo and ooh over a stranger’s baby than I am over their shoes or haircut.
If you don’t like standard conventionalized responses to common but noticeable life changes (you’re engaged! how did that accident happen? etc.) then just stay away from human beings. That’s what we do, and there are good reasons why we do it. Many people see it is a pleasant brief exchange of good feelings. There is a large cohort of women whose emotions are highly aroused by cuteness, which is sad for the grumpy stoics among us.
By the way it doesn’t stop, at all. “Gee, Billy’s gotten into graduate school! You must be soooo proud!”
I guess I could see being upset over the “kidnapping” remarks (although they seem innocuous to me, and I’ve has an infant as recently as 3 years ago) but I don’t get being upset by asking how old he or she is. That’s a pretty common baby-related question.
That is literally the only question I can think of to ask about a baby. “How are its grade in school?” “What are its hobbies?” The baby doesn’t have hobbies or grades. It does nothing else but shit itself, so what else is there to ask? You just ask how old it is and call it cute or something (even though it looks like Ernest Borgnine).
This has to be one of the Top 10 lamest rants I’ve ever read here. You hate it when people say extremely nice, and extremely normal things about your baby?
I am a middle aged childless spinster, by choice, and I have never been much interested in babies, preferring puppies instead, but then my best friend went ahead and had herself a pair o’ babies, and so now I hang out with babies. They are nice babies, so nice, that I was persuaded to strap one to myself while my friend took the other one and we went shopping for books.
It was odd and disconcerting to be approached by strangers who wanted to coo over the wee girlie I was holding, but I took it to be just part of social niceties that people admire babies and say silly things to them.
Also explains why my friend likes it when I bring the dogs to the farmers market when we go. Big, scary looking, pointy eared dogs tend to attract attention away from her twins.
I don’t understand the hatred for the “how old” question. I get asked that about my daughter often and I answer it without a second thought (well, other than figuring out how old she is).
No one’s ever threatened to kidnap her. Now I’m afraid that I have an ugly kid.
When my kids were babies I was stopped a few times by people who said, “Those can’t be your babies.” The first time I was really thrown and I asked what the hell they were talking about. They explained that the kids have blue eyes and I have brown eyes so they figured that they weren’t my kids.
First, how the hell did you notice that? Do you take stock of the eye color of everyone you see? One elderly couple made this observation from about 10 feet away. That’s impressive for old geezers. Musta been snipers in WWII.
Second, contrary to what you may have been taught in your third grade science class, a brown-eyed parent can indeed have blue-eyed offspring. It’s unusual but it happens. My wife has blue eyes and there was a 12.5% chance that our child would have blue eyes. We beat the odds twice.
Third, it’s just a stupid thing to say to someone. What if they were adopted?
The second time it happened I was prepared. “Those beautiful blue-eyed babies can’t be yours.” “Oh shit, I took the wrong kids from the playground. Gotta go!”
Oh, yeah, gotta love those people who state the kid can’t be yours, right?
I grew up the only red head in a family of people with dark brown to black hair, one of only two with green eyes (everyone else had brown), and with skin several shades lighter than everyone else except my dad (who nonetheless has black hair and dark brown eyes). I also grew up with people saying such gems as “whose family does she belong to?”, “when did you adopt?”, and “she can’t be your sister”.
:rolleyes:
(For the record, the pale skin is dad’s and the green eyes are mom’s - you’d think maybe some of those folks would notice? Naw.)
Anyhow, I hereby confess to asking the ages of babies. I also have been known to ask the ages of toddlers and small children. Assuming the child is old enough to be walking I usually ask the kid and a lot of the time the kid will respond, thereby relieving the parent of said duty, but of course babies don’t impart much information on their own.
In the context of where I work I’ll do a brief coo over a baby, maybe ask the age, state the critter is cute/adorable/whatever, then move on, just as I say hello to the adults and ask if they need help. I try to acknowledge there’s a living person there without overstaying my welcome.
I agree, the “kidnap threats” are a little creepy. So are statements like “Oooo, so cute, I could just eat him/her up!” Um… really? Is this a Hansel and Gretel story with cannibal old ladies or something? Is that how the fairy tale got started?
I’m 42, and have 2 boys- one 3 years old, and one 7 month old.
Both are absurdly cute; when on vacation in Amsterdam in 2012, we actually got stopped so some Japanese tourists could take pictures of the older boy because he was so cute. Now people stop me in stores to tell me how cute he is in his little Harry-Potter style glasses.
The younger one could honestly be a baby model… or an infant version of the Michelin Man. He’s super cute, and really social for a baby, so people wander up from nowhere to gawk at him and make faces.
While it’s kind of annoying, I figure it’s better than people looking wide-eyed and thinking or whispering “What’s WRONG with that kid?” or “A face only a mother could love.”
This one of those topics where there’s never ever going to be one correct set of behaviors that pleases everyone. I’ll say whatever I feel is appropriate, and if you don’t like it, you can ask me to change, or just tell me to fuck off and have nothing more to do with me. I’m not going to lose any sleep attempting to please all parties.