W. BRUCE CAMERON - Lost in the Baby Shower

You’d think I’d enjoy a baby shower — after all, I like to see babies (I even was a baby once), and I like to take showers. But I’ve always elected to avoid them because no one has ever invited me.

That all changed when a former co-worker asked a bunch of us over to celebrate her former pregnancy. She now had a little 6-month-old girl she named Andie and wanted to throw a coed baby shower so all of the men would feel stupid.

See, baby showers have their own rules and their own vocabulary. You can’t just open a few beers, put on the basketball game and call it a “great party.” For example, take the baby running shoes that Andie was given (so that as soon as she learned to stand up she could tackle the Boston Marathon). All the women at the shower knew to squeal, “They’re so tiny!” and make special eye signals at each other. The men were thinking, “Well, but they’re for a baby, so you wouldn’t want to, you know, give her a size 12.” We were all pretty bewildered over how delighted everyone was that they’d given running shoes to someone who couldn’t even walk.

“I knew I should have gone for the skateboard,” one guy muttered.

Also, every baby outfit is either “cute” or “adorable.” The men never knew which one was which, so we pretty much stuck with saying things like “nice!” and “rock on!” (OK, it wasn’t the men who said this so much as just me. Clearly, though, when I said “rock on,” it was just another way to say “adorable.” Unless, of course, it was cute, and then “rock on” meant “cute.”)

Andie was pretty rock-on herself, in my opinion. But then someone gave her a hat with a yellow duck on it and put it on her head, which was proclaimed to be adorable. Andie didn’t think so, she just thought there was something on her head. She didn’t want something on her head, or maybe she just didn’t want a duck.

Either way, Andie started screaming, which caused a lot of clucking and smiling amongst the women and widespread panic in the men. The women picked up Andie and said, “There, there,” while Andie chewed them out in baby-speak for decorating her head with water fowl.

“I don’t think she likes the hat,” one guy said. OK, it was me who said it, but the baby was screaming, so what other conclusion was I supposed to reach? As it turns out, you never should suggest at a baby shower that the baby doesn’t like the gift, even if she takes one look at it and throws up, which is what happened with one present in particular. It’s bad etiquette. (The suggestion, I mean. Throwing up is apparently OK.)

We all gave one man an incredulous look when the mother unwrapped his gift for the baby and it turned out to be a DVD of “Avatar,” because we had no idea the movie was already on sale. The men felt the gift was rock on, which is what several men, or at least one of us, said. That’s when Andie barfed, but we knew it wasn’t in reaction to the gift because there was no way the baby had already seen it.

The guy with the DVD advised us a few days later that his girlfriend chided him for giving a DVD to a baby because babies do not watch PG-13 movies, but they don’t run track either, so we didn’t see what the problem was. We did all agree, though, that had we known it was a dumb gift, we would have heaped derision on the giver on the spot, which would have been bad baby-shower etiquette.

In my opinion, Andie didn’t really like any of her gifts — for her, the best part of the day was when someone finally took the duck off her head. Oh, and she did seem to like the cake, both for eating and for squishing in her hands and smearing on her cute outfit and adorable haircut.

The cake was rock on.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about Bruce Cameron and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at http://www.creators.com.

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