Why you should dress your baby girl in pink and other musings

I'm a little sleep deprived, I'll admit. I have that glazed over new mom look. It's sort of like a cross between a hangover and someone who just woke up from a twenty year coma. I obsessively think about getting a full night's sleep. But I'm also at that place in chronic sleep deprivation where I have trouble falling asleep when I actually make it to my bed. So maybe that had something to do with the bizarre conversation I had with a stranger in the line at Barnes and Noble today.

Let me preface this by saying that Laurel often wears a fleece Penguins sleeper as a coat when we go out. It's kind of gold in color. It was one of the things that M couldn't resist buying for her when, in the early days of her life, he went out for toilet paper and tofu and came back with all kinds of other goodies. But I digress.

Here's the conversation...

Stranger: That's a cute baby. He's real tiny.

Katy: She. Yes, she's pretty small. She's 3 months old.

Stranger: My boy was like that. In the third percentile. They always put him with the girls.

Katy: Well, actually she is a girl. But yes, she's on the small size.

Stranger: You know what happened though? When he hit 13, he grew. All of a sudden.

Katy: Hmm, well maybe that will happen to her. But her father and I are both pretty small, so...

Stranger: Don't you worry. He'll catch up to the boys.

Katy: Um, ok. Thanks, I guess.

So, I finally get the pink thing. It's to help facilitate the social discourse of check out lines. A woman at the Co-op yesterday mistook Laurel for a boy, because she was wearing a blue hat. I corrected her, and then she felt the need to gush over how pretty she was, I think to overcompensate for her mistake.

Really, it didn't bother me.

It's almost as bad as the constant queries into our sleeping habits. Seriously. She's 3 months old. Some babies wake up at night to eat. It's completely developmentally appropriate. Sure, I'm tired of waking up every few hours, but I'm more tired of talking about it strangers.

(And yet, I can't seem to stop going to the bookstore to try just one more book by a sleep expert.)