TOO CUUUUUUUUUTE!!!!!

Women love babies. This is a good thing.
Because, let’s face it, if it were up to men the human race wouldn’t have made it this far.
Just picture this scene; during the Stone Age a group of primitive humans huddle around a roaring fire. A man shoves a barely cooked piece of Mastodon meat at a toddler. The child makes game but pitiful attempts to eat the meat. Finally the man snatches the food away and, glaring at the kid, snarls, “What the hell, I gotta chew it for you, too?”
See what I mean? The start of eating disorders -- and the end of the human race.
So yes, I understand why women and their ‘feathering the nest’ instinct are sort of indispensable. I get it, at least on an intellectual level.
But, I must admit that, on a more instinctual level, I would dearly love to throttle the neck of the woman who, upon viewing a pink baby’s jumper, first shrieked the words, “Too Cuuuuuute!!!!”
In the first two months after Vivienne arrived I heard the word ‘Cute’ used more often than in the prior ten years. ‘Super-Cute’ and ‘Too Cute’ were also pole-axed into my brain on a regular basis. And it’s not like I was attending baby showers, I avoid those things like the plague.
And, now that I think about it, I would prefer getting the plague to going to a baby shower. Seriously, with the bubonic plague you know you are going to be dead in three days, tops.
But a baby shower? With its games, and wrapping paper and feminine squeals of delight, now that truly has the potential to stop time and drop a man straight down a worm hole into Dante’s seventh level of Hell.
And don’t get me wrong about the whole gift-giving gig; I am all about getting free stuff from friends and strangers. You’d have to be nuts not to love free stuff.
As a newly minted house husband one of my nightly chores is cleaning the dishes and I was thus engaged after dinner one night when two of Rochelle’s friends dropped by to coo over our daughter Vivienne and her plethora of ‘too cute’ outfits.
Now, these are nice women, and I like them in every respect. Normally they are intelligent, and good conversationalists, and interesting observers of life.
Normally.
But some strange affliction descended upon them when they entered our home. I was scrubbing away at the plates and pans in the kitchen sink and I wondered what had become of the two people I had once talked politics and movies with, for from the living room came inhuman shrieks of glee that seemed out of all proportion to the occasion.
And then my head began to melt in on itself like a special effect in a Poltergeist film and I let out a horrid cawing sound like some winged freak from hell let loose at last.
And I collapsed in sobs over the sink.
Still the gaiety in the other room continued unabated.
While back in the kitchen I held up a water glass, studying it closely while I considered shattering it in the sink and picking out the sharpest shards to plunge into my eyes.
Okay, just so we’re clear here; a man would prefer jabbing shards of jagged glass into his eyes rather than listen to the fairer sex coo over baby clothes.