Facebook Wars

I dubb this year the year of the Babies. In August my cousin had his baby boy. In September, two classmates of mine had their sons within ten days of Jacob's own birthday. In November my uncle (yes, my 50-something uncle with kids MY AGE) had a baby girl. In that month, my friend from grade school also had a baby girl. In January another cousin had a baby. In February my old roomate had her baby. Then later that month, my 50-something uncle's daughter (the cousin my age) had HER baby girl- it was a real live Father of the Bride 2.

It must be contageous. Apparently, we have been procreating fools.

But here is my problem. Most of these people who have just had babies are my Facebook friends. And many of them make annoying status messages such as "INSERT NAME thinks that no baby could be cuter than her son!" or photo captions such as "Cutest baby ever." These subjective statements are probably meant to be harmless, but I can't help but take them as passive aggressive slights. I want to reply "Really? You post this status message knowing that your friends who will be reading it just had babies of their own. Are you TRYING to pick a fight? Or are you just trying to be an attention whore? You crazy self indulgent parent!"

Yeah, I know every parent thinks her baby is the cutest baby in the world. But posting it on Facebook is like announcing it boisterously in a room full of new parents. Rude! It's like me going up to a bunch of other moms and saying "My son is way cuter than your sons." Who would do that? But it's ok to do that on FB? And doesn't "cutest baby in the world" tend to equal "cuter than yours"? Ok, I know I'm being overly sensitive, but it's just because they won't admit that Jacob is Baby Universe.

Thus begins the Facebook War.

One parent starts out by posting a picture of her baby captioned "It's not possible. There isn't a cuter baby!" The next thing I know I'm reading someone else's status update that says "hanging out with my son, the cutest little man!" Translation: "No way. MINE is cuter and I'm letting the whole world know!"

Then my cousin posts something like "My baby just crawled!" And someone comments "Oh isn' it exciting when they crawl. My son is everywhere now, we have to watch him so carefully!" Translation: "OMG my baby is way better than yours because he has been crawling for like two months already. So woop-de-doo."

Then a friend posts a picture of her son in disposable diapers. My other friend coments, "Oh you guys use disposable? We switched to cloth diapers, they've been great for us." Translation: "Disposable diapers are so ew. Your kid has no chance. We are single handedly saving the environment and raising an environmentally friendly, crunchy granola kid!" Other friend retorts, "Well, we thought about cloth diapers but we can't afford a diaper service right now." Translation: "Shut it bitch, not everyone is RICH like you."

Then my friend updates her status to "woke up to my baby's 5:00 wake up call. need coffee" Someone comments: "Just wait until he starts teething like my baby is- then it gets really bad!" Traslation: "You think your life is tough? Whatever, I'm way more tired than you will ever be. You don't even know the meaning of tired!" Someone else comments "I'm sorry. That must be hard!" Translation: "My baby started sleeping through the night at one month old- twleve hours straight. In fact, my baby is so awesome, she has a camel hump where she stores extra milk so we only have to feed her once a day."

I'd love to get all these people drunk and in the same room. In fact, let's move this fight over to YouTube~!