A Baker's Dozen in Diapers

12 babies, I counted 12 babies in sacrament meeting at church today. And those were just the ones I could see from the back row. There had to be more that I couldn't see. We also have 6 openly pregnant woman, all of whom currently have babies. Church is beginning to feel like Gymboree.


I know there are distinctions between toddlers and infants, etc. But if it wears diapers, I'm calling it a baby. "Baby"= a non-verbal, non-house trained mini human being. One man told me today that he was lodging a formal complaint against the noise in sacrament, that he was fed up with the parents who chat and coo over each other, and let their babies loose. It was too noisy and he was going to change wards if something wasn't done. He was serious.


It doesn't bother me enough change wards, babies are ubiquitous in Mormonland. Still, I wish someone would tell these people that everyone does not think it's cute when their spawn goes hobbling down the aisle sputtering goldfish crumbs (because Cheerios are passe')? They let their babies wander, climb, cry... And the babies gather to pick each other's noses and throw goldfish while making primitive sounds. The only thing their parents do is look at each other over the mass of babies, and smile, as if to say, 'that's so cute, they're friends'. Yeah, except for that big one who is hitting the little one on the head with a toy.


Today, while I was trying to ponder the mysteries of the divine, a woman who has 3 babies, didn't notice one of them was crying for five minutes. Five minutes is a long time in church. She just let it wail. Maybe she thought it was one of the other dozen babies. There's so many babied young couples, that they have their own clique. They take up half our ward. I think it's made them too permissive, like they've forgotten they aren't the only people at church so it's okay to let the babies run around.

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On a similar note, I recently had a little run-in with a mommy in the church lobby. She gave me a baby fashion lecture when I commited the faux pas of referring to a boy as 'she'. It wasn't even hers. But I apologized and said that I couldn't tell. I was very smugly told, "He's wearing blue, isn't he? Blue, usually, means that he's a boy. So if you see a baby wearing blue, you can be pretty sure he's a boy. And when you see a baby in pink, then you know that she's a girl. That's how you can tell the difference." So I said, "But there's no baby fashion police to enforce the rules, so maybe some people don't follow them? And what about the other colors, like green, yellow, brown? What do you do then, call the baby "it"? She was not amused.

Oh, well. I'm going to start sitting in the front row, where there are zero babies.

I wonder if this might bother me more because I am single and childless, as is the complaining man. Does the church gymboree bother everyone else as much?