Monday, May 4, 2009

conversations THROUGH babies (?)

I'm curious about this thing we adults do whereby we use babies and pets as conversation mediums. For example, the following conversation took place a couple of mornings ago while Jason was playing with Zor and I was cooking breakfast. (Rated PG)


Jason, to a fussy Z: Zoralee, what's your problem?
me: Be gentle with her! She's just tired.
Jason: Mama's trying to do attachment parenting with you. I'm doing dis-attachment. She's yin and I'm yang, because she has a yin and I have a yang.
me: Oh, Papa's not trying to do dis-attachment with you. That's ridiculous. Anyway, it was Papa's yang and Mama's yin that got us into this predicament.

I mean, we were talking to each other through our 5 month old daughter. I remember doing the same thing with our dog, Beth. I guess we only do this with people/animals who don't have a voice of their own. It would be a little loony to use a perfectly conversational fellow adult as our medium, with them sitting right there.

Other times, we'll put words into Zoralee's mouth, as though she's backing us up on some point, like, "Papa, Mam's really thirsty and could use a glass of water." Do we really think that a baby's supposed opinion lends credibility to what we're saying? If anybody has psychological insight into this phenomenon, do tell.

5 comments:

Don Conrad said...

Ha! Yin and Yang will never be the same.

Christi said...

My mom likes to tell me things by talking to my kids. Talking to Milo in baby voice after he was play biting today: "Oh yeah, you need to start being held accountable for that, don't you?" I try my best to hold back from replying back to her through him.

Anonymous said...

This intelligent coversation is way to far out of my reach I can't figure it all out! Let me know when it all comes together!!!

Mom Stoffer

Rachel @ Lautaret Bohemiet said...

I recently had a conversation through babies.

Cam and I went to visit a friend, and when we arrived, we were both holding our cups of coffee from Starbucks (it's right by our house, see). Well, the baby of the friend began to reach for my cup, which I pulled away quickly of course. Even though the cup was pulled far away, the mom said (to her baby, "No! Don't reach for that. Momma doesn't like Starbucks and doesn't support it."

Boy, that 10-month old baby sure learned a valuable lesson.

And so did I.

lori said...

Ha ha ha!

Follow up conversations you could've had, but must not have:

"Oh, dear baby, Momma's friend likes to support local business too, but today, instead of goinging to a further, local coffee shack, we went to Starbucks. Because we wanted to save fuel and do our part to reduce the effects of global warming."

or else:

"Oh, dear baby, Mommy's friend thought it would be okay to have one cup of coffee from Starbucks, since she doesn't yet have any children which create a bigger carbon footprint."

or else:

"Tell Momma to shove it."