Father Doesn't Know Best

The other day, while eating lunch by myself in the food court of our local mall (not normally something I do, but I had missed a lunch meeting nearby and had a craving for Rubio's,) I was "people-watching" while I ate.

As I was looking around at the many families with small children that tend to occupy the mall in the middle of the day on a weekday, a woman pushed an infant carrier/stroller over to the table next to me, sat down, and started playing with her baby.

Now, since becoming a parent last year, I have noticed two things about babies/children in public:

1) They seem to be everywhere now, as if they weren't before. It seems to be the same effect that happens as soon as you buy a "unique" car, thinking that you don't see many on the road, only to find that every other car on the road is the same as yours.

2) I like them a lot more than before. Prior to parenthood, I had no emotion toward babies or children. It wasn't that I didn't like them, or dislike them, it was just that I was "baby neutral" without feelings in either direction toward them. Now, it's as if a switch was flipped in my head, and I find children facinating to watch, not in a weird way, but in awe of how amazing children and babies really are.

And, as I have learned is common practice in the parenting world when someone pushes a stroller by you, whether out of legitimate interest or to secretly compare how cute someone else's child is versus our own, it is normal to look at the baby inside of the stroller.

So, as the woman sat down next to me, I looked over at the baby in the stroller that had just rolled by me. When I saw that the baby inside was a cute (but not as cute as my own) little girl, of about six to eight weeks, I smiled.

Unfortunately, it seems, my innocent gesture was misconstrued by the new mother who, upon catching my gaze while I smiled at her daughter, immediately turned the stroller so that her baby was not facing me, as a look of concern swept across her face.

Uh...what just happened?

Did I somehow offend her by smiling at her child? (Or was it that she had somehow read my mind to discover that I thought my daughter was cuter than hers?) What exactly did she think I was thinking? Would her reaction have been the same had I not been alone? Did I not get the memo that said smiling at babies isn't ok anymore?

Now, I'm not the best person to talk to about parent-to-parent etiquette. When someone, holding a baby of their own, tells me how beautiful my daughter is I simply say "thank you" and go about whatever I was doing, without complimenting them on their child (that they seemed to be fishing for compliments for.) When the same parent tries to continue the conversation with me by asking how old my daughter is, I tell them her age, and continue about my way, not asking the age of their child. (Mostly, because I really don't care.)

My wife has scolded me on several occasions for my parental etiquette "faux pas", and reminds me that the polite thing to do is to ask about the other person's child. (Even if I really don't care how old their kid is!)

However, the one bit of parental etiquette that I do know and follow is that it is polite to smile at children, especially if they smile at you first, and if the occasion permits it, one can even wave or make a face at the child.

But, maybe I am wrong.

Being a new parent myself, I know all too well the paranoia that comes with the territory. And, every news story of an abducted child, or my personal (least) favorite: stories about people using information and pictures of children found on people's Facebook pages to do everything from cyber-stalking to adoption scams, all seem to provide the justification to treat every "stranger" as a potential threat.

Furthermore, I can appreciate that a lone man (albeit, a well-dressed and clean-cut man) can be viewed as a potential "weirdo", so maybe I'm just offended that someone would react that way to me, a father, smiling at a baby.

Was I in the wrong there? Did the mom overreact, or am I the one being ridiculous? Should I keep my eyes to myself when I'm by myself, unless accompanied by my wife or daughter?

I am not the kind of person who does well to follow a list of instructions in the order required. Instead, I tend to jump around to the steps that I find the most interesting, and complete those first. This is why I am terrible at baking.

My daughter seems to have inherited this ability from me.

Some time between six and seven months of age, my daughter started propping herself up in the crawling position, so we assumed she would start crawling soon. Since she had figured out how to roll from her tummy to her back at three weeks, I thought that she would crawl early as well.

By the eight month mark, she still hadn't started crawling and didn't seem to have made much progress. As other babies born around the same time as our daughter were starting to crawl with ease, we started to wonder whether there was something we should be doing to help her learn (or even something we were doing wrong!)

By nine months, she had developed a method of locomotion that can only be described as being the same method that chimpanzees use to move about their pens at the zoo. It was a combination of rolling, scooting, and spinning. It was odd, but it got her where she wanted to be and it seemed to make her happy.

At that point I tried to tell myself that she was a savant and had figured out a new way to move on her own, but in shameful secret I started wondering if something was "wrong" with her. Why hadn't she figured out how to crawl yet? Would she ever crawl?

As the days of crawlessness went on, my wife gave me yet another parental factoid that I had never heard previosuly: Apparently, some babies walk before they crawl.

At the time I thought she was just trying to make me feel better, but as I told "The Story of the Scooting Baby" to more people, they also confirmed what my wife had said and told me stories of their own "late crawlers" who had suddenly pulled themselves up and started walking before ever crawling.

So, since my daughter seemed to be bored with learning how to crawl (since her own method was more fun) I decided to test the theory, and my wife and I started propping her up on things in the standing position to strengthen her legs and ready her for walking.

Usually, I would prop her up on the couch while I was sitting on it, which she seemed to enjoy. She would stand, happily smacking her hand against the cushions, and picking her feet up, although they never went anywhere.

One day, while she was propped up on the couch, wiggling around and stamping her feet, I realized that she was farther away from where I had initially set her down. After picking her up and placing her in between my knees, I watched as she maneuvered her way around my knees and to the couch cushion on the other side.

Did she just start walking?

I got off the couch and watched her, to see that she was picking up her feet and moving them to the left, then moving her upper body with her arms! She was walking! (kind of)

A few weeks later, with the same knack for completing steps in the wrong order as her father, she figured out how to pull herself up onto objects by herself. A few days after that, she figured out how to crawl (properly) too.

So, maybe my daughter didn't figure out how to crawl/walk by the traditional order of things, but at least she is mobile enough to chase her friends around at daycare.

Now, time to finish the baby proofing!

So, our first Christmas with our daughter in our lives has come to end. There is a trail of dead pine needles running through my living room carpet, where I carried a dead piece of nature through my house. Garland and strands of lights are tucked away in their boxes, to be opened and displayed again in eleven months. Christmas was great, but every last remnant of the holidays is now packed away until next year.

That is, except for the pile of toys that has taken over half of my living room.

In an older blog post, I had written about how my daughter's toys had already started to wage a war for real estate in my house, cars, and various other places (See "The Toys Are Taking Over"), but I was not nearly prepared for the second wave of reinforcements to commence their attack on the free spaces of my life, as they have since Christmas.

Granted, some of the damage was self-inflicted since many of the toys were purchased by my wife and I, but some of the worst invaders of space (or would they be "space invaders"?) were innocent gifts from grandparents or other loved ones.

For example, my wife's parents, who have said that they would like to get my daughter a real pony on more than one occasion (despite the lack of stables, much less grass, at our house), got my daughter a "test pony" in the form of a three-foot tall stuffed pony that whinnies and makes trotting noises, for her to "ride" on.

My daughter, although unable to walk on her own yet, absolutely loves sitting on the pony and playing with it's mane, and lights up every time we press it's ear to hear the trotting noises.

The down side: My living room has become a boarding area for my daughter's new equine friend.

The up side: The pony is actually the only non-rainbow colored toy in the living room, and actually matches our furniture better. (That's right, I decorate my house with toys.)

Although my living room now looks like a test center for Fisher Price, seeing my daughter light up on Christmas as she tore through wrapping paper and ribbon was remuneration enough for aiding the enemy in the war for carpet space that has been waged by Elmo, pony, and friends.

Luckily, my daughter actually has a good-sized closet, for a nine-month old, and my wife and I will be able to take a couple prisoners-of-war to store on the top shelf of her closet, to be rotated out as she gets bored with whatever toy is currently attacking the living room.

Next year, I am asking Santa for a play room!