It’s curious to see differences not only in attitude, but in simple observations across people of different ages. Many of my younger friends will mention how small Roby is, how small babies are in general. My sister has observed this as well. When you grow up seeing most of the babies you’ve seen on a TV screen it can be kind of incredible to see just how tiny they can be. Since most TV babies are either fake or a minimum age.

My mom mentioned that her sisters would make the same comments about how small babies were and her mother, my grandmother, would admonish them. It’s bad luck to say a baby’s small! A baby should be big! They’re growing and they’re big! That’s the right thing. 

There was an XKCD comic about the tendency for experts to overestimate the knowledge of we mere mortals. My grandmother, as mother of seven daughters, was an expert on babies. As an Italian Catholic born in the early 20th century, she was further still, an expert. 

I know very few baby experts.

I think they are very rare things, increasingly so in our age of decreasing birth rates. 

What I’m getting at is that Babies are not things like obscure geology, and it’s sad that they are specialized knowledge about which we are comically ignorant and of which our grandparents assume a degree of knowledge that we do not have. Nonna admonished her daughters because she thought they were being rude. The reality is a fair bit sadder. I think a finer world is one where we know that babies ought to be big, and when. 

That’s not to say anyone’s done anything wrong, it’s more Nonna’s fault for not introducing my aunts and mom to more babies than it is theirs for not knowing. The saddness is really that our social systems don’t have thelevels of support and community that they should.

We’re left to find things out on our own, and to be confused when babies are tinier than the kids that just play babys on TV.