Shortly before Parker arrived on the scene, I stumbled upon this post at Childfreedom. As I was 9 months pregnant, I thought stork spots were a pretty awesome idea. However, I’ve never actually seen a stork spot here in NH, so they were a new idea to me. I could sort of understand where the author was coming from – as one of my co-workers loves to regularly remind me “children are a choice”. He’s right, I did choose to have children, and I accept all of the trials and joys that come along with that.
I think what bothered me most about this post, and this site in general is that I had never realized that there was this whole population of people out there who not only choose to not have children, but are actually offended by people like me who choose to procreate. I can still recall my life before kids, and I don’t ever remember colliding with the kid friendly crowd when I didn’t want to. Aside from being irritated at parents who bring small children to adult movies (a topic which deserves its own rant), I can’t think of a time when a kid inconvenienced my lifestyle before I had my own kids.
I never thought of our society as “child-centric”. I think it’s pretty easy to avoid kids in places like bars, and late movies, grocery stores at the right time of day/week, etc. Even if you don’t want to actively avoid me and the rest of the kid-friendly crowd, I am very conscientious of my children in public – making sure they are not noisy or disruptive in adult situations, making sure they use their manners (well, I haven’t really started the 2-month-old one on manners yet – he still spits up on people without warning…) I guess I don’t like being stereo-typed. Sure, some parents probably do let their kids run wild, but there are at least an equal number of kids and parents who are nice, kind, polite people who do not belong in this category, and do not deserve the disdain this site doles out.
So, the stork spot post in particular, and this website in general really bothered me. What do you think – is this lady right, are the child-centric people encroaching on the child-free people of the world or is she unfairly stereo-typing families?
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That elusive first smile started to make an appearance this week! For the most part, Parker continues to maintain that puzzled or slightly annoyed expression, but once in a while, if you say the right thing, or look the right way, he will reward you with the cutest, biggest open mouth smile you have ever seen. Of course, this smile is so elusive that we have yet to catch it on camera, but we’ll keep trying. One of these days I’m sure we’ll trick him into smiling for the camera 
