Stop touching his hair!

Ok, I'll admit this up front: my son is an anomaly. He is a blonde-haired, green-eyed boy in a sea of brown-haired, brown-eyed children. But that isn't his fault. (It's the fault of some whacked-out gene somewhere back in the gene pool.) And if you looked at esposo and I and our son, on first glance, you might be tempted to wonder whose kid he really is (take a better look, and you'll see how much he actually resembles both of us). Ok, so he's blonde. I get it. He's different. He's cute. Blah blah blah.

However.

This does not give people the right to touch his hair! He's not a freakin' Buddha, for you-know-what's sake! They will not gain some magical power by touching his hair. It is not more likely that their children will be blonde if they touch his hair. It doesn't feel any different, I can assure you. So WTF is up with everyone touching his hair? He absolutely hates it when people do that (random strangers, we're talking about here), and if someday he hauls off and yells at or otherwise is nasty to someone who touches his hair out of the blue, I would not blame him in the least. I have wanted to, on occasion, to yell at people myself, such as the woman in front of us in line at the grocery store yesterday, who of course, had to turn around and ooh and ahh at son's hair and then she touched it. He nearly screamed. I just looked at her like, well, you didn't ask, what did you expect? Get a clue, woman!

When I was pregnant (and I'm sure a lot of you moms out there can relate), I can't tell you how many total strangers wanted to touch my belly. Like you would do that to someone who wasn't pregnant? Is it a good luck thing? Most of the time I would say no. My friends usually didn't even ask such a thing (probably, I suspect, because they all had the same experience at one time or another). (And the ones that did ask, well obviously that didn't bother me, because they were my friends. There's a big difference between your girlfriend rubbing your big, pregnant belly and a complete stranger.) I mean, ladies, do people just go up to you in the supermarket and grab your boobs? No, of course not, and if they did, you'd be calling the police, right? If someone came up to you in a parking lot and started petting your hair, you'd freak out, wouldn't you? I would! Where is the personal space?

While I'm rambling, I remember back when son was newly-born, and (again with the complete strangers!), because he wasn't bundled in a parka from head to toe, people would always say things like, isn't that baby cold? We got so sick of hearing it (cause, ya know, newborns don't have good circulation in their hands and feet, that doesn't mean they're cold), that esposo one day told some random woman in the AutoMercado parking lot, this isn't freaking Alaska! I laughed my ass off.

I guess that's what I need, a good retort. Or maybe just the guts to tell people, he doesn't like it when people touch his hair. Though I think if he screams at them, they'd get that, loud and clear.



In other news, we have the coolest grasshoppers in this yard. I know that I probably should be trying to get rid of them, but they don't eat that much and they really are pretty to look at. I took a picture of the one on the left, and didn't even notice the camoflauged one on the right until I downloaded the photos to the computer: