In Which We Meet a Baby

In the category of little things that matter to no one but me (but it’s my blog), we had one of C’s classmates over for ribs on Sunday. He came with his wife and almost 8 month old son. The dogs have been around a toddler before, but this was their first exposure (okay, probably not June’s actual first exposure, since she came from a family with very young kids) to a baby. And they were champs.

They were interested in sniffing him, and Junebug licked his hands (thank heaven for parents who like dogs and think that’s cute), but there was only one instance of them trying to jump up where he was, and Larry stopped himself mid-jump. When the baby got cranky toward the end of the visit and started crying (poor thing was teething), all of the dogs just went and laid down in the sun, away from us.

I held the baby for a good period of time so that both of his parents could eat, and none of the dogs got jealous or tried to climb in my lap with him.

It’s not like I have ever believed any of our dogs would hurt a baby. I very firmly believe that animals understand the concept of babies across species. But at the same time, since they had never been exposed to a child that young, I could not be positive how they would react. I was super pleased with how it went, and made sure to tell the dogs how good they were being throughout the visit.

The funny part is, after our guests had left and I mentioned to C how happy I was about their reaction to a crying baby, he gave me a blank look and said that that was something he’d never thought about, the dogs’ reaction to a crying child. So maybe I worry about things I shouldn’t.

But, considering that we’re working toward bringing a baby of our own home sometime in the next year or two (got to love the adoption process), I was overall very pleased about how the visit went.