Naughty

That was what the person, the parent of a seven month old baby living nearby, thought it appropriate to say as Mrs L popped a dummy into The Creature’s wailing mouth.

I was not there at the time. Perhaps fortunate, as I’m fairly certain I’d have wanted to grab another dummy and use it to silence her. Possibly with a bit of duct tape for good measure.

Mrs L is a kindly soul though, and ignored the statement.

She continued to ignore it when it was followed up with “my baby has never had a dummy, she’s never needed it, she’s self soothed since she was a month old”.

Another gem: “I’m really sure that [baby] will be good at sport. Because me and her dad are both really fit and good at it”.

I checked, neither of them are in the Olympics, so they can’t be that good.

Yes, three months into parenting and we are beginning to encounter competitive parenting. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I had my warning just days after The Creature was born, courtesy of @tattooed_mummy:

“I wonder how long before you are drawn into the land of "competitive parenting" *sigh* try to ignore the "oh mine was already doing that at 3 weeks" sorts of comments.”

Obviously we’re all proud of our offspring. I get that. But why do so many parents feel the need to operate as their child’s personal PR machine? Cam smiled somewhere between six and eight weeks. I forget exactly when. I know I loved it. I know I blogged about it. But I didn’t make a point of asking every other parent how long it had taken their own child to smile.

I don’t care.

Just like I don’t care if your baby never needs to have his bowel movements helped out with laxatives, or that your baby could recite the alphabet (backwards and in German) when he was just hours old. It makes no difference to me or my baby.

What it does make me want to do is tell you to SHUT YOUR SMUG FACE.

Instead, I’m going to start making wild claims of developmental excellence on the part of my baby. What can I say to the competitive parents to wipe that smug expression from their face?

It needs to be good.

“Cameron was watching Question Time with me the other night, and he just couldn’t believe how the panellists were competing over which drugs they’d done. He thought it highly immature”.

Or.

“Cameron got a call from George Osborne today, asking for some input on a revised fiscal policy. Of course he had to say he couldn’t help out, he was too busy trying to work out how to hold his head up off the floor”.

Those are rubbish. Maybe I’ll just go for some one-upmanship.

“Oh, your baby is walking already? At nine months? Amazing! Cam moonwalked out of the womb, singing Billie Jean”.

Or perhaps I’ll just carry on as I have been, ignoring them and hoping they’ll go away.