Baby fever

I don’t have it; Baby does.

It seems like half the people I know are in possession of babies, especially newborns, these days. When we see them I like to hold them a couple of minutes, maybe make some funny sounds at them, comment on their cuteness, perhaps help coax out a burp, and then I’m done, ready to pass the squalling, floppy things back to their tired mommies.

Not so Baby. She rather insists on getting to hold them, hug them, kiss them, pat them, burp them, love them, squeeze them, ad inifinitum. Why their mothers prefer to hold them themselves, perhaps nursing them, or keeping them in their little car seats, she doesn’t know and finds intensely frustrating. She knows she would be awesome at holding them. She reaches out her arms, indicating, “Just hand him over, he’ll be fine, give him here!” For crawling babies, she’ll follow them around trying to hoist them up, or drag them into her lap. This is especially funny as some of them weigh more than she does. When she has had the brief opportunity to hold a newborn, or sit with an older baby, Baby is, indeed, gentle and sweet, intensely curious, quick with the kisses. It’s darling. But eventually we take the baby away from her, and her disappointment is quite clear. She simply does not agree that, as a one-year-old, she is not an appropriate caretaker for a zero-year-old.

Though I don’t usually post pictures of other people’s kids, one newborn is largely indistinguishable from another, so here is a hilarious picture of Baby holding a (really big) three-week-old, who looks quite alarmed about this turn of events (though honestly Baby was doing a great job holding him; I can’t imagine what his problem was).

In related news, she also enjoys holding kitties:

The siblings of these babies aren’t nearly as obsessed with babies as Baby. Maybe they want to hold them or check them out from time to time, but then they find other pursuits. But Baby is never done with the babies. And since seeing all these newborns recently, she’s been particularly into her dollies. For many of her waking hours Baby will cart around her baby doll or a humanoid-looking kitty cat and a doll bottle with fake milk. She likes to check their diapers and burp them. Perhaps it’s a phase. It makes me even more glad, though, not to have a newborn in the house of my own. Running interference all the time would be exhausting and sooner or later that baby would get toted around by its neck and then dropped; I can just see it. Yet another reason to wait until Baby is three, or four, or never, to have another baby. Baby will just have to wait!