A few weeks ago I headed out to make a dent in the old Christmas list with two of my favourite girls — my daughter and her four-month-old daughter.
Hitting the malls with a baby, especially one as picture-perfect as my granddaughter (spoke the unbaised 🙂 ) proved to be an interesting experience. Perfect strangers stopped us to ooh and aah, exclaim and sigh, and indulge in that peculiar language in which none of us are fluent until we see a sweet little tot.
Certainly we weren’t accosted by everyone in sight; we did manage to stroke a few names off the list after all, so there was some shopping done. But anyone who saw our sweet miss paid attention in some way, whether by forcing us to stop, at the most extreme, or at the very least by sending a gentle smile in her direction. There literally was some kind of spontaneous reaction from virtually all those who saw ‘a baby’. Just a glimpse of that cherubic countenance literally turned frowns upside down. When I remarked on this phenomenon, my daughter blithely noted, “It happens all the time.”
The American humorist Don Herold once said, “Babies are such a nice way to start people.”. How true. In them we see purity and innocence as yet unaffected by life and its influences. How can we look at such soft-skinned perfection and not be instantly enchanted?
So here to bring a smile to your day, along perhaps with a few oohs and aahs, are photos of some of the nicest people:
