Driving in rush hour DC traffic gives me a severe case of split personality disorder. Case in point: while driving through the city on my way back to Richmond last Friday around 6pm, a car with a Quebec license place veered into my lane without signaling or waiting for me to let them over (one of my BIGGEST pet peeves). In this order I: beeped my horn, threw out the bird, and then shouted "F*** you CANADA!". I am not proud of this behavior.
On a related note I've realized that DC rush hour traffic does not start or end during the weekday, it simply exists all the time except for one break in the morning maybe from 10-11am.
My sister's neighborhood is filled with tourists right now because of the combo of the Cherry Blossom Festival, spring breaks for kiddies and the Zoo being one street over. These tourists are harmless except certain situations. One of these was last week when I attempted to take the baby in the stroller. Now a little background: baby HATES the stroller more than anything in the world. She will maybe last five minutes in the thing before she starts shrieking and begging for freedom. Yet I try to take her in walks in it so as to acclimate her to the stroller because when she gets too big for the sling she will no longer have a choice in her method of transportation. So, I did this the other day and of course by the time we went around the block she was screaming so loud I might as well have been water-boarding her. So I go to pick her up from the stroller and you know, stop the absolute and total torture it is to be carted around the neighborhood like a little princess, and when I turn my head there is a tourist family of six, complete with backpacks and hats, across the street all motionless and staring at me and the baby who was in the midst of her best Exorcist impression. I thought about smiling, waving, and saying "Oh don't mind us, she's just a little sore still from the beating." But I somehow refrained.
Walking around with a baby in a sling garners a lot of comments from strangers. Particularly when the baby in said sling is the cutest baby on the planet (and no, I'm not biased). My favorite comment was a completely unintelligible string of words spoken by a man in heavily accented English of which I could only make out "the bay-bee".
I used to think that I would never baby talk to my own child. But after being around my niece I realize this is foolish. Because when an adorable baby starts cooing at you and making little gurgly noises the ONLY appropriate response is to say goo goo ga ga. You don't even have a choice in the matter. Suddenly you realize that you are fluent in baby and that there is no more pefect or beautiful language in the world. There is simply no way you could respond to a baby with, "well baby, I hear you and value your opinions, now let me respond with my own thoughts, perhaps about the stock market or the latest episode of Lost." You have to speak their language.
When a baby spits up in Starbucks in a crowd full of people on their Blackberries and I-phones, it is funny. If the baby had projectile spit-upped (which she is wont to due) it would have been comedy gold.
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