20 Questions

I'd always heard that babies are conversation starters. Like the guy who gets a dog, so he can go to the dog park and chat up the ladies and their pooches, SB gives license to people, both friends and strangers, to break the ice and ask questions.

These conversations are very nice, and a godsend to someone like me, who has been isolated from the "real" world and starved for human interaction of the non-baby sort. Most people either complement SB, acertain her gender (she often wears gender neutral garb), or ask her age, a question invariably followed by a "Oh, she's so little!"

Occasionally however, I am surprised by the queries that Bree and I get regarding SB.

Is she walking yet?

and, along the same lines...

Is she talking yet?

While I'd like to believe that our girl is a Mensa scholar, destined to walk on the moon, be President, and cure cancer, all by the age of 12, I gotta be realistic. Even though all of this is probably true, they don't quite start talking at 10 weeks.

Otter got candy at Halloween. Which was very very sweet (no pun intended). The giver of treats was surprised that she wouldn't be eating it yet.

Ok...I do get this a bit more. Before I had a baby, I wasn't clear on when they start eating what. And to be perfectly honest, I'm still not 100% sure now. But I think I've always known that they don't subsist on Reeces Peanut Butter Cups and Almond Joys until they're toddlers. On the upside, if she were to start eating chocolate now, at least she couldn't rot her teeth.

While it seems strange to me, all these are understandable for people who don't have babies in their lives. But the most bizarre conversation happened this weekend at Trader Joes. As I was walking through the frozen food aisle, with SB dangling away in her Bjorn, a random man cam up to me and said...
"Is that a real baby?"

I'm SO not kidding. After making sure I hadn't misunderstood him (I hadn't, sadly), I told him that yes, in fact SB was real. Then I asked, "Do people often walk around with fake babies?"
"You never know with people these days," he replied, completely seriously.

Yeah, you never do know with people.