babies

People in my age group are starting to have babies. On purpose, even. It’s a pretty big step, I would say - it was only sort of scary when my friends started getting married or buying houses, as marriage and houses don’t cry a lot and eventually turn into teenagers - but babies! Those things are an investment. Investments that spit up.

I’m not ready to jump on the baby train any time soon - as far as responsibility and desire go, I’m not prepared for anything more than a mid-sized dog (something with a 12-year lifespan). But, still, it’s nice to see my friends turning into moms and getting to look at hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the little guys doing baby-things - drooling, crawling, stuffing their own fists in their mouths like babies do.

But here’s the thing: I am confounded when people look at a brand-new infant, sometimes still covered in gunk, and say, “she has her mom’s eyes/nose/mouth/face!” or, “he’s a spitting image of his grandfather!”

So - let me in: are these just widely accepted lies that we spout to new parents? Does everyone involved including the parents understand that these are niceties? Or do I lack some sort of innate baby feature detection system? Because the babies always just look like babies to me. And unless the mother also has a purple, tiny, smooched face, I don’t see how any adult can look like a newborn. Aren’t you, through the symmetric property of mathematics, telling an adult that they look like a fat-faced baby that just spent nine months stuffed in a womb?

For example, don’t all infant noses look exactly the same? Aren’t noses things that develop throughout our whole lives? Seriously, go examine some infant noses on the internet. I know I did. They are all just tiny little baby button noses, down to the very last adorable one.

Who knows, though. This might be my own problem to wrestle with. I’m also historically bad at telling solider characters apart in war movies. To this day, I have no idea what the hell happened in The Thin Red Line.

Either way, though, next time someone says that a newborn baby looks exactly like an adult, I plan on taking that baby, placing it in a room with 20 other babies, mixing them all up, and then having the person go into the room and find the right baby. I know like it sounds like a lot of work just to prove a point, but I have a feeling that it would be worth it. Now to find 20 babies…

My dear cyberfiend Beth From Avenue Z has tagged me for a meme. After looking up meme in Wikipedia and then wondering what else I don’t know about modern culture and how soon teenagers will be rolling their eyes at every old-timey word I speak, I decided to go ahead with it. I don’t want to make it a habit or anything, since it seems kind of forward-y (do email forwards still exist, or is that so five years ago? Now I’m doubting my every move and word.) but I also don’t have anything pertinent to write about today. Just like so many things in life, sometimes I need a little jumpstart.

So - the deal is that I write seven facts about myself and then tag seven people down below and they write seven things about themselves. Because obviously we don’t talk enough about ourselves on our blogs.

1. I had an intricate daydream this morning during work that my cube mate (the one that would be an affable, normal person except for the fact that she sits next to me all day and is therefore annoying) accidentally got pregnant and had to start working from home due to some complications that required bed rest. Everyone was so happy - she’s engaged, so it’s not a terrible kind of unplanned pregnancy, and I’d be without a noisy neighbor who pronounces things weird for nine months, not including her maternity leave after the baby was born. And maybe by that time she’d decide to become a stay at home mom!
2. Not to mention that I would be comforted by the fact that it wasn’t me who got accidentally pregnant - you know, that great dodged-a-bullet feeling? Except that in this case the bullet is a baby?
3. I never have intricate daydreams about having children myself. It’s not that I don’t eventually want to have them, it’s just that I spent many years as a nanny and have a pretty realistic view of the vast rainbow of bodily fluids that babies and toddlers produce. While other women my age only see pictures of friends’ babies dressed up like Tigger or sleeping soundly or doing something adorable with a spoon, I saw the things that you don’t take pictures of, like tantrums and oh god it’s been two hours and the tantrum is still going on.
4. One of the other things I like to do during the boring time at work other than daydreaming  is look at what kinds of houses I could buy in different parts of the country for the amount that Ben and I spend renting our “cozy” railroad apartment in Queens. It makes me feel that weird happy-and-sad-at-the-same-time feeling.
5. And I secretly kind of like feeling sad. So the happy-and-sad-at-the-same-time feeling is actually like feeling double-happy.
6. If you’re struggling to understand what it means to feel happy and sad at the same time, I urge you to think back to the ending of Charlottes Web.
7. The book, not the movie.

I realize I probably didn’t do that right. Okay, now it’s time to pick some victims (and no, I won’t get offended or sad or even happy-sad if you don’t do it): Molly, Hilary, Amanda, Nora Rocket, my new evil twin Slurredpress, Dan will probably not do this, and neither will Brian. Wow, that was surprisingly painful.