Step Away From The Baby

From ParentDish’s most recent post:

Thumbs Down. You spot a pair of tiny feet bouncing along in a stroller and can’t resist taking a peek. What cheeks! What big, brown eyes! What an adorable sign hanging precariously above the baby’s head warding me off lest I whip out the hand sanitizer! We’re not joking. The signs read, “Please wash your hands before touching mine” and come in red, blue and pink silicone rubber. They cost $7.95 and can hang almost anywhere. A well-intentioned mother who gave birth to a premature baby created the jarring baby accessory, so we understand why germs were an issue for the mom. But isn’t it a parent’s job to model good social skills for their children by graciously addressing strangers who like to innocently touch babies instead of relying on signs to get the message across?

Umm. No. How about teaching our children that if someone disrespects their private space will tell them in no uncertain terms?

For the first six months of his life everytime I was out with Declan in public I would lose count on the amount of people who insisted on touching him. In the pram, sitting on my lap, even in the sling, the child was not safe from the prying fingers of strangers. Fingers that I didn’t know the history of, I didn’t know what they’d touched prior to stroking my babies cheek, they’d be shopping right? How many hands had their change gone through before it hit theirs? Had they touched another baby before they decided to touch mine? DOGS! What about DOGS?!

So PD says I just need to graciously tell the stranger not to touch my newborn. Fair enough, but the kind of people that would listen to a gracious request aren’t the kind of people who are busy jabbing their fingers in my baby’s face. Those people understand that you don’t just wander around touching freshly birthed babies. The finger jabbers are the kind of people that when you say “Please don’t touch him, he’s asleep” the respond with “Oh just his cheek, it won’t wake him up!”, it might not, but when I crack your skull for ignoring my “gracious request” it will probably disturb his slumber.

So for baby #3 I would probably consider this sign, or I could just do what one of the women in my mother’s group did when faced with the ongoing barrage of strange hands reaching into her pram; place a fart machine in the bottom basket with the presser to activate it attached to the pram handles. If you think a sign is jarring, wait till you see them pull their hands away when your infant lets rip with a fart that measures on the richter scale. Suddenly the friendly coloured sign doesn’t seem quite so horrendous, eh?

Interestingly enough, Connor never got many touchers, maybe the slightly psychotic look of a frazzled mother internally berating herself for even CONSIDERING leaving the house with two children under the age of two scared them off.

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