out and about

The weather has been amazing, and Jake and I have been parading ourselves up and down Passyunk Avenue and around the park. Walking with a baby stroller opens you up to a whole new subset of the population- a very chatty clique that includes old ladies and young mothers.

Girls my own age with babies just walk past me. We have nothing to say to each other. We are tired, we are thirty, and we are trying to tighten the saggy glutes. Nothing more, nothing less. We check out each other's strollers and bellies, just to see who is winning. They may have a Peg or even a Bug-a-Boo, but I have a time and temperature gauge. And a flat belly.

The younger girls want to know how old the baby is and seems more importantly, how old I am. They usually have a scaled down version of the stroller, and often brag about the deal they got on the carseat/stroller combo at K-mart, and complain about the cutesy pattern on the fabric. They want to know how often I feed, bathe, and hold my baby, and ask where I get all the information to do it right (the clock, the stench, and the fussing). They talk about how they will be married soon, or how they were married because of the baby. A few accidentally got pregnant on their honeymoon, and now don't know what to do about school. Some talk about how hard it is to be a single mother. I can't imagine, as I can hardly stand being single from nine to five on weekdays.

The old ladies want to know what my husband does for a living, when and why I'm going back to work, where I live, and make sure that I am breastfeeding, since "girls these days are too lazy to figure it out" or we "are too worried about what our breasts look like after we are done to be concerned about our babies". Then they whisper something to the baby in their native tongue, which in my neighborhood is either Italian, Spanish, or some type of Asian, usually Vietnamese or Korean. They like to tell me about non-disposable diapers made of old curtains, doing the laundry in a tub, what it is like to have a child a year for an entire decade, how I should breastfeed exclusively until the baby goes to college and then send it along in a Fed-Ex Freezer-Pak so he can put it in his coffee. I say, when a child is old enough to stand up next to you and be mouth-to-nipple with your breast it is time to wean. Or one year. Or when it becomes a total pain in the rear end. Whatever.

And of course the old ladies aren't that crazy, most of them say breastfeed for about two years and they only had a child a year for eight years.