Just say NO!

Today I have a funny baby anecdote for all you baby lovers out there. This actually happened a few weeks ago when Oliver was just 6 months old, but after my “buff baby” post got so much feedback I couldn’t let this funny incident slip by.

If you’ve been reading along, you are starting to get familiar with my everyday life in Cabo San Lucas. A lot of which happens to take place hanging out at the Hangout Café, which is where we were one evening with Oliver when we happened upon one of the Hangout Café employees with her very plump baby girl. Jaime was chatting her up with Oliver, while I was surfing the net and chatting with some other locals at the café. Not much later he had me come over to check out her baby and guess how old she was. In general, I’m very accurate in my assessment of age. I suppose that’s partly because hardly anyone can rightly guess my age. I’ve always been very petite, which sometimes ends up spanning my age from 30-something (my real age is 32) all the way to 18 (on certain stylish days). I’ve even been assumed on occasion by my parents’ friends to be the youngest of the family, even though my “little” sister is eight years younger than me.

Anyway, back to the baby girl. So here I was eyeing this large infant trying to make an accurate guess of her age while at the same time not offending the loving mother. I could tell that she certainly wasn’t much older than Oliver by the way the mother was holding her, but she was twice his size! Then to throw me for another loop, the mother told me that she weighed 15 kilos, equivalent to about 30 lbs, whereas my little Oliver weighed just under 7 kilos. Her weight threw me for a curve. I ended up making a wild guess, “9 meses?” But no! She was 6 months old just like Oliver.

But here’s the funny part, or at least I think so. As Jaime and I tried to be nonchalant about what we felt to be a baby on the road to obesity, we took part in some more fun show-off-your-baby talk. We told her about Oliver’s achievements and she told us how her baby walks all over the place in her walker, says “bye bye” and even “no.” Being a breastfeeding mom and the mother of a “lean baby,” better known on my blog as a “buff baby,” I couldn’t help but ask about what the heck she feeds that large child. She quickly informed us that her baby had never taken to breastfeeding and that she started her on solids at 3 months. Ah, that explains things…

Back at our table, I said to Jaime, “I’m sure that if we fed Oliver that much, he’d be saying “NO” by now too!”