You got a real purty mouth

One of the wonderful things about having a baby is basking in people admiring your baby, especially when you're reasonably sure your baby doesn't have any major "what the hell is that?" features...well, reasonably, because it's hard to see your kid outside your parental love eyes. But sometimes...it gets a little much.

There's the usual problems of people who are too enthusiastic. You get your people who are all "Oh my! What a pretty baby! I love babies! Can I hold her?"...and you're thinking "okay, crazy person who I just met for the first time 2 seconds ago in K-Mart, I would love you to hold my baby, which I just finally got to sleep by walking her around K-Mart for an hour because she wouldn't sleep at home...I would feel very safe, because what stranger could possibly be a danger, at the Big K?"

I also have a 10 second comfort rule. If someone I come across (while not standing in a check out line where you're stuck next to someone for long periods of time) someone who has long, awkwardly paused out, compliments...I run out of "oh thanks!" responses. I don't know what to do or say if they're still going on about the baby for more then 10 seconds and I have somewhere else to be in the meantime. I don't want to be like "gee, thanks, gotta run!", because they're being nice, and their day is probably boring enough that a baby face is breaking it up...but still...awkward.

Then there's the unusual compliments. Usually, Holly gets noticed for her crazy, curled up bed-head hair, which is in crazy abundance for a child her age. Most people want to wax nostalgic about how much/how little hair their child had in comparison. That, by the way, is the first question asked after height/weight/health after you have the baby: "How much hair?". Poor, poor bald babies. Sometimes people notice her big blue eyes, or the fact that Holly loves to smile at everyone. Then there's the woman at Target who my wife is still mystified with. She turns away from her own little girl, looks at Holly very critically, then looks at us and says, very caustically for some reason, "My, she has a very beautiful mouth"....her mouth? Seriously?

Then there's gender confusion. Which is acceptable. She has short hair, babies are generally androgynous, and we have a gender neutral (read: mostly boy coloured) car seat/stroller. My favourite though, is one day I had her in a pink dress, with a pink fluffy bow in her hair, with pink and white with ladybugs belt protectors on her carseat, and this woman comes up, cooing at her. Holly smiles back, because she's an attention whore, and the woman says, "Oh, I think he's flirting with me! Oh, he's such a little flirt"....alright.

There's no huge complaints. I have more of a problem with people not noticing babies and how cute babies are in general, because I'm a new parent in my early 30s and with us and all our friends, babies are the most important topic, so it should be with everyone else, damn it, right? Right. It's just...her mouth? Really?