Heart Patients in the Making

I saw a mother, her baby (about one year old, I think) and the baby's father, presumably, on the bus today. The mother weighed at least three hundred pounds. Now, I am no featherweight, but neither will I ever look like that! I wouldn't care what she had looked like, though, because that's between her and her doctor. The problem was the contents of the baby's bottle and food tray.

Pop and French Fries, respectively.

Now, my daughter has had the occasional sip of pop. Most of the time, it was her aunts giving it to her, and I protested loudly. She has never had pop (as far as I know) in a glass, and if I ever learned she had been given that by my sisters, they would be fired as babysitters, at least for a while. The occasional French fry has come her way, too.

The problem here was that the baby was given a whole fast-food carton of fries. Not the small carton, either. A super-size one. When the mom realized that the baby had apparently finished her fries, she took the bottle and filled it with coke from her own glass.

I have trouble believing that a) there was no reasonably baby-appropriate food in the child's diaper bag; b) the mother appeared to consider these offerings baby-appropriate; c) this didn't appear to be a first or an occasional thing; there was no sign of exploration, only the same nonchalance the baby would have expressed at finding milk in the bottle; and d) that the father was doing nothing about it, either.

Parenting should be a required course in high school.