It is increasingly obvious to us that our baby, of all the babies in the entire world, is the cutest baby there is. We know this for several reasons:
1) We think she's cute. Now you'll say that we are hardly subjective and of course we think our baby is the most beautiful creature to ever crawl this earth, but we are both intelligent, objective, independent people who are not above admitting to ourselves an ugly truth, or an ugly baby.
2) All of her relations say she's cute. Again you'll argue that this is not exactly definitive proof either, since her relations will also not be entirely independent and probably as blind as we are, but we're going to take their words for it because:
3) Perfect strangers go out of their way to tell us she's cute. Or more likely, they won't talk to us at all. They'll interrupt an earnest conversation about whether to buy another pacifier to replace the 10 misplaced ones, duck their head in to Sydney's level and go: oh aren't you precious boy you're a cute one what beautiful eyes.... oh, I'm sorry. They'll finally say to us. But she's just the cutest thing.
This last phenomenon drives us crazy, as it makes shopping a hazardous obstacle course full of well meaning, googly-eyed old ladies, sentimental, sheepish middle aged men and younger people of both genders who look at our bundle o' joy with romantic ideas and have no idea what they're in for.
These conversations are excruciating, because no longer is this a matter of one adult being rude to another, as was the case throughout the long nine months of pregnancy, but of an adult ignoring the social constructs of normal human behavior to ogle directly at another human being, who, cuteness factor aside, is learning rapidly from everything around her--including that her smile will get her everything in the world, that everyone loves her, and that she is the cutest thing around.
On the other hand, we don't want her to think that all strangers are weird and scary. "Thank you," we say politely, if we can ever get a word in edgewise.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Actually, talking directly to babies is instinctual. So is "baby talk." There've been a lot of studies done that show that the pattern of speech that we call "baby talk" is not only universal, but is designed to increase children's phonemic awareness. So the reason why people talk directly to babies in that particular way is in order to begin training the child for speech and communication. In other words, an evolutionary survival trait. If you're interested I can find you some sources.
Which reminds me, as I librarian I have to ask to make sure: you are reading to her regularly, right? :-)
Lots of things are instinctual, like having sex, but that doesn't mean we have to do them, especially not in public to perfect strangers.
And yes, of course we're reading to her. We've just finished "War and Peace" and are moving on to the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy with a little Nietzsche mixed in.
Okay, just kidding. But we are reading the original Winnie the Pooh to her. :)
My partner wishes he knew how much attention a baby could attract when he was single.
I beg to differ with you on one point though. Our daughter (currently 7 months old) is the cutest baby in the whole world, as evidenced by the same 3 points. But I guess since we're in Australia, its possible that maybe some of the ogglers over there haven't had the chance to worship at the altar of our little K.
Post a Comment