Babies and politicians: a simile
I haven’t been blogging lately because we’ve just returned from our tour of the Gret Stet of NC and shoo-wee, I am tired. We were maniacal enough to do yet another 12-hour marathon journey, which didn’t suck as bad as the first, and daddymatic and I came up with a theory we’re testing out: babies are the ultimate politicians. At least Heavy D is. He is a TOTAL slut for attention (and his mother writes a blog, you say? Interesting. No chance it’s genetic, then?) and gets very frustrated if people don’t give it to him. For instance, we were waiting in line for a sub yesterday and they dude behind us was resolutely ignoring the little guy, who started to bark out these little tiny screams. When the dude would look at him to try to figure out where the highly annoying noises were coming from, Heavy D would grin at him and bury his head coyly in my shoulder.
But the politician theory evolved this way: while on the East Coast Remix Tour, we stopped at a lame mall in Maryland to let D-Lovah crawl around and play in the kid zoo-thingies they have at malls—you know, the things that are basically a padded room enclosed with mesh? They are a second cousin to the highly vaunted McDonald’s Playland. Well, oddly enough, he liked being in the mall better than being in the babyquarium because he could try to get people’s attention. He’d wave, crane his head around while being carried, and grin at people as he walked along hand-in-hand with us. If, God forbid, people didn’t look at him, he’d grunt in frustration and simply try harder (“maybe if I wave AND smile?”).
We decided he must be running for some public office the way he was schmoozing—he’d go up to older folks and try to charm them (“Hi, I’m Davis A. and I’d love to have your vote next Tuesday.”) or he’d go up to kids and try to make them think he was cool (“I’m Davis A, the hip baby who cares about the issues that are important to kids like you.”). If he’d seen another baby, he’d probably have kissed it. He was absolutely shameless. At one point, we stopped at a little grouping of couches in the middle of the mall and he kind of slouched over a coffee table in front of a sofa where these two teenaged girls were talking and proceeded to grin, coo and babble at them. You could tell they were, like, sooo totally OVER babies, but he was undeterred. And like any good politician, he is a pathologically the-glass-is-half-full kinda guy. While we felt the response was kinda lukewarm, he was incredibly optimistic, claiming as we left the mall that it had been a “big win” or we’d “brought our A-game” or something cliché and politicky like that. Also, he also appears to have no sense of budget, as he has ignored our requests to conserve diapers and repeatedly looks at us as if to say, “You’ve got to spend money to earn money.”
We can only assume he sees us as his staff, a conclusion we reached mostly because he seems confused by having to work with a skeleton crew (ie, just me and daddymatic) now that Bee-bee and Grampy are not here to round out the staffroom. We are, evidently, simply responsible for costume changes and making sure there are enough turkey wienies to go around. He’s pretty self-centered and a tiny bit tyrannical. But we’ll probably vote for him anyway.
But the politician theory evolved this way: while on the East Coast Remix Tour, we stopped at a lame mall in Maryland to let D-Lovah crawl around and play in the kid zoo-thingies they have at malls—you know, the things that are basically a padded room enclosed with mesh? They are a second cousin to the highly vaunted McDonald’s Playland. Well, oddly enough, he liked being in the mall better than being in the babyquarium because he could try to get people’s attention. He’d wave, crane his head around while being carried, and grin at people as he walked along hand-in-hand with us. If, God forbid, people didn’t look at him, he’d grunt in frustration and simply try harder (“maybe if I wave AND smile?”).
We decided he must be running for some public office the way he was schmoozing—he’d go up to older folks and try to charm them (“Hi, I’m Davis A. and I’d love to have your vote next Tuesday.”) or he’d go up to kids and try to make them think he was cool (“I’m Davis A, the hip baby who cares about the issues that are important to kids like you.”). If he’d seen another baby, he’d probably have kissed it. He was absolutely shameless. At one point, we stopped at a little grouping of couches in the middle of the mall and he kind of slouched over a coffee table in front of a sofa where these two teenaged girls were talking and proceeded to grin, coo and babble at them. You could tell they were, like, sooo totally OVER babies, but he was undeterred. And like any good politician, he is a pathologically the-glass-is-half-full kinda guy. While we felt the response was kinda lukewarm, he was incredibly optimistic, claiming as we left the mall that it had been a “big win” or we’d “brought our A-game” or something cliché and politicky like that. Also, he also appears to have no sense of budget, as he has ignored our requests to conserve diapers and repeatedly looks at us as if to say, “You’ve got to spend money to earn money.”
We can only assume he sees us as his staff, a conclusion we reached mostly because he seems confused by having to work with a skeleton crew (ie, just me and daddymatic) now that Bee-bee and Grampy are not here to round out the staffroom. We are, evidently, simply responsible for costume changes and making sure there are enough turkey wienies to go around. He’s pretty self-centered and a tiny bit tyrannical. But we’ll probably vote for him anyway.
posted by the stefanie formerly known as stefanierj at 1:56 PM
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