On Monday I took my son out for a walk. He hadn’t taken a nap since his last bottle yet and I knew that if I used the stroller he would be too interested in everything around him to bother sleeping. He’s a nosy little guy and he’d rather keep himself awake and look at all the interesting stuff around him then take a nap. My solution for this was to toss him into my Carrier and wear him out for our walk.

We went to the store of liquid gold (Tim Hortons) and got me a hot cup of life sustaining goodness.

On the way back from our walk I remembered that My husband had mentioned that he wanted to make burgers for supper that night and that we had neither buns nor lettuce.

Not a problem!

I’d brought my wallet out with me in order to get my coffee so I was good to get everything else I needed at the store. I picked up my lettuce, selected two of the plumpest looking fresh buns for sale and with my hands full of wallet and groceries I made my way over to the checkout lane.

By the time we’d entered the store my son had woken up from his nap and was contentedly snuggling up against my chest, blissfully unaware of anything going on around us since I had him facing towards me.

I was singing along to the song on the store radio to keep him entertained and this must have gotten the attention of the woman in front of me in line.

She turned around and saw that I had a Baby strapped to my front.

Keep in mind, my son had been napping in his carrier so even though it’s no longer strictly necessary I had put the head support up so that he was fully supported in the carrier. You could just see the baseball cap adorning his head over the top of the carrier.

This woman reached out, pulled back the head support and caressed my sons cheek while proclaiming just how adorable he was.

I froze. I couldn’t think of anything to say about the situation. The back of my mind screamed for her to stop but I couldn’t get my mouth or my hand to react to force her to get away from my son.

What, pray tell, makes anyone think that this is an appropriate way to behave?

When I was still pregnant with my son I was a pretty active lurker on r/babybumps on reddit and I’d heard about all of the stories of random people reaching out and rubbing pregnant women’s bellies. This never happened to me and I lived in the magical land of “people around me must just be more considerate!”.

I found out afterwards that it wasn’t so much that people were considerate so much as people didn’t realize that I was even pregnant. Hurray to having a coat that had ended up way too big after I’d lost all the weight.

But I’d still never had a situation occur where people overstepped their boundaries.

Lots of people commented and exclaimed on what an adorable baby my son is. They stop to stare into his stroller or to make faces to try to get him to smile. They’ve even made assumptions on what gender he was and told me that I had the most beautiful of daughters. But no one had ever touched him.

I’d just assumed that it was because people know, you do not touch a baby that you don’t know.

Looking back, I wish I would have said something, or just straight out smacked her hand away from him. I don’t know whether or not she’d had clean hands. Does she wash her hands after going to the bathroom? Had she been gardening recently? I have no idea. Even if her hands were clean, I have no idea who she was. That’s saying something since I live in a town of about 4000 people and am related to or at least know a great portion of the populace.

So think of this as a warning: No matter how great the urge is, don’t touch someone’s baby without asking first.

Now that it’s happened once, I know to act quicker if it happens again. I will smack down to protect my child and without specific permission to touch him, it will happen.

Bonus pictures of my delicious burger.