You know when someone is being a jerk, and you basically want to say “Its cool if you are in a bad mood. But can you be in a bad mood not around me? It is kinda making me like you less.” Whether a friend or a total stranger, when exposed to someone’s ugly side it is much easier to focus on how that person sucks rather than why they suck.

When you have a baby, you can’t exactly just take off if they are in a negative frame of mind. It is not exactly kosher to say “Hey… baby… why don’t you crawl that way into the woods and come back when you are more pleasant to be around.” Unlike an adult where you can make up an excuse for having to get the heck away from them, with your baby, you have to figure out what is going on.

The other day, The Munch was being a jerk. She wouldn’t let me put her down, she didn’t care about the toys I dangled in front of her face, and she was grunting with a sense of urgency that made me feel like I had done copious amounts of cocaine. At first, I felt like “Wow… I think this baby is broken? Where can I return this thing?” But then I realized, “Wait… it is not like she is just jerk baby… something is going on!”

So I went through the usual checklist of all the things that could be wrong and discovered that she was growing a new tooth! I just have to add here, that The Munch has 3 teeth that all seem to be sprouting in totally random places in her mouth. I am not sure if their placement will make more sense in time, because right now there seems to be no correlation to the normal constitution of where teeth are supposed to be. Or maybe she will end up having a smile sprinkled with sporadically placed teeth.

I digress

This moment with The Munch was like a grand epiphany about human nature. Everyone has a reason for why they suck, you just have to care enough about them to find out why. So the next time someone is being mean to you I suggest you first, pull out the back of their pants to see if there is a poo in there, rub their tummy counter-clockwise to get out any gas, see if they are bored with a nice game of peek-a-poo, or shove your finger in their mouth to see what is going on in there.

“What? What did I do?”