Tag: baby

Being a ’00 baby

I was born in the year 2000. I entered into the world like a boss at the very beginning of a millennia. I made history when I opened my eyes. The doctor said “OMG, this kid is special”. He didn’t say OMG because I was cute or cried for my milk like an 80s rockstar. He said OMG because I was born in the dopest, swaggest, and most practical year of the 21st century. 

Being born in 2000 puts me at an advantage over everyone else in the world, save the few that were chosen to hold the same title as me. What is the title, you ask? 

We are called ’00 babies. 

Did I make it up? Not really.


I know. I know…


According to The Free Dictionary and Wikipedia, ’00’ is an acronym for public toilets in Germany and Eastern Europe but that’s not stopping us. On the contrary, we know this is a ploy to take our title away from us. We’re not giving up. We find strength in the jealousy of people born in not-so-cool years. We feed off the envy of those who say they’re better than us because they’ve ‘experienced both the 20th and the 21st centuries’. C’mon. They’re not that special. 


Look at people born in 1987 for example. What a pity. You have no idea how many people who asked them about their birthday ran away because they felt threatened. Can you blame them? It sounds like a countdown after 1. 

Or look at 1969. It looks like 9 did a flip. 

Or  consider 1992. 9 is definitely third wheeling. 

1991 looks like a mirror image gone wrong.

Face it. None of them are cool enough.


I actually even agree with many people who say that it should have been illegal to be born in 2000. It’s just too cool. There’s a line in Scott Pligrim vs The World where Todd Ingram absolutely wrecks Scott and this girl says “In short, being Vegan just makes you better than other people”. I would say that’s the case with us ’00 babies too (pls forgive me Vegans. I lou you all).  There totally should have been a law put out sometime in 1998 (another number I’m not even going to start dissing) that all men and women should, for the sake of the people of the 21st century, master their passion and abstain from all activity that may result in ’00 babies.


Imagine if that actually happened. An year that saw no babies. Pampers and Huggies would go bankrupt.  As consequential as it would have been, I think it’s a step people from the 20th century should have taken. 


It should have even been a matter of security. Such a high number of zeroes in someone’s birthday is scary. After all, zero is like the most secretive number ever. Kids don’t even know that it’s a legit number until they learn about Whole numbers in primary school. In some cases, they don’t know it till after they get into middle school. This is rare but very common with kids who have way cooler things to do than learn about numbers. Even NASA when they do the countdown for their launches makes sure you never hear the zero. They blame it on the rockets. I don’t believe that for a second.


You have to know that I’m extremely grateful to have been born in 2000. I came pretty close to losing the title. Thank God my mom didn’t meet my dad a year before. What a disaster it would have been to be born in 1999. At the cusp of making history but falling down into an abyss of numbers that are not special at all. A bottomless pit of numbers that lack the abundance of the magic of the 0 (cue choir Aaahs). 


Imagine all the recognition and fame I would have missed out on. It would have been such a pity. But it would have been a greater loss to have missed out on the practicality that comes with being born in 2000. I just need to look at the last two digits of the current year to know my age. Believe me when I say it’s a much faster process.


If after all that I’ve said you still don’t believe me, I don’t blame you. Most ’00 babies are still on their way to becoming famous and successful. But mark my words when I say we will take over the world. 


Peace, hugs, and love.


P.S. If you were not born in 2000, hit the like button. If you were, where the heaven have you been all this time??? 

Author’s note:
The above post is part of a series called ‘Mumbo is Jumbo’. This series will look at seemingly silly ideas and make them weirder. Some are meant to be funny, while others are meant to bring out the aesthetic qualities of an experience. This particular piece was inspired by my belief that being born in 2000 is cool.

Baby Embrace

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It’s amazing what you can learn from a great relationship. The raw, sincere love that you come across in a relationship somehow jolts and shakes you violently, waking you from your dormant stage of inaction and makes you do something for other people. You learn to value life a smidge more.

Yesterday, I was sitting in the last row at church, attending a music event. As I sat there, I was looking on amused by the actions of a baby boy on his father’s shoulders.

He was just sitting there, his face like the face of any other baby, a face that is trying to make sense of everything around him. Things did change for him after he came out into this really bright place. No wonder babies have got a look confused at times, when they see us. They have a way of seeing through the words, mostly because they don’t understand them.

They make conclusions completely based on what they see and what they feel and sometimes by what they hear, especially when it’s too loud.😊

You know how when you ‘meow’ at a cat, it suddenly cocks up its head and looks at you like, ‘What in the world……’ and then looks around as if to ask the world ‘Has he lost his mind?’ Yeah, I love that look, which is why you’ll always see me ‘meowing’ at cats. Lol

You’ll understand why I said that in a few seconds.

Anyway, I was sitting there, persistent, determined to make him smile, but he just sat there, the little ‘daddy climber’ giving me the ‘cat- look’ ( described above ).

He seemed very amused by my special techniques to make him smile. So did many others in my row. So I put on my serious face and looked on.

He looked at me one last time, I could see a faint smile there, but then, he is one of the living alternatives to the ever smiling Barbie dolls. 😊 I just sat there admiring him.

He was tired, evidently ( as all my master techniques to make him smile had went down like a lead balloon (with smoke 😊)) But I still could see a lot in this baby on his father’s shoulders.

It was absolutely amazing. Every time he looked up to criticize my professional attempts, he would, after giving me the ‘cat-look’ lay his head down, in extra slow motion on his father’s shoulder. And every time he did that, I mean literally every time he did that, his father would react.

It was as if some shock had gone through the father’s body. I would see his hand hug the baby closer and his head would slightly tilt to meet the baby’s head. Every. Single. Time.

It was a gentle embrace. An extremely beautiful one. One that showed the small effort of a baby to show love and the greater effort of the father to give every inch of it back.

It’s the ‘baby embrace’. That’s how you hug a baby. You can’t hug him like you hug a grown up person, you have to go that extra mile and let him rest completely on you. And if you don’t, according to protocol…… He. Will. Cry.

I sat there trying to imagine that baby growing up, sitting on his fathers shoulder. I tried to imagine him on his father’s shoulders, thirty years old. Though odd, it seemed to make sense to me.

I’m not a father, but I believe, every time that father hugs him, be it twenty or thirty years from now, he is going to hug him in a way that his baby boy can completely rest on him. Every time he hugs him, he’ll be trying to put every drop of his love out there. Every time he’ll be doing a different version of the baby embrace.

And I doubt we as kids ever understand the depth of that embrace or the meaning of that embrace, a meaning that has its roots in a time that we will never remember. But then, maybe that’s what makes it so special.

I am already choking up writing this. And maybe you are too.

We are lucky to have parents. They are not perfect, they are human just like us, though we expect them to be so much more. For some of us, they might not be here today, for some of us, we might just have had an argument with them. But for all of us, they’ve left an inheritance of amazing hugs.

Next time you hug somebody in need, hug them the way your parents did.

Hugs and love……
Stefan

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God bless you guys!!!