It is always interesting when we take Sophia out...anywhere. She is not a very shy girl at all and will smile or talk to pretty much anyone. We will seriously need to work on stranger danger with her. There is the rare person that she doesn't want anything to do with and will cling to us or whine a bit, but like I said, that is rare. And there are a lot of people that smile and say hi and wave and talk to her. I totally appreciate that complete strangers can see how cute my little sweetie pie is (I mean, she is a cutie!) but as if shopping isn't hard enough with a one and half year old, it can be pretty challenging to focus (or get the job done) when well meaning (or just plain weird) strangers feel the need to chat with your child. Or about your child. Or about their children.
Michael and I were at Babies R Us on Saturday afternoon. We only really had a few things to pick up and decided to just let Sophia walk around and see what she was interested in (plus running up and down the aisles would hopefully tire her out, haha). We were maybe half way through the store and a very tall dark haired gentleman saw her running away from me and Michael and was like "oh, she's so cute, she reminds me of my boys". So we said thanks, blah, blah. Soph stopped and smiled up at him and walked back over to me...at least at this point she does stay somewhat close to me when strangers are around. We figured he'd just go on his way. No such luck. He went on to say he has two twin 22 month old boys and is a stay at home dad. Ok. Michael and I kind of looked at each other since we weren't sure where the conversation was going. The guy asked how old Sophia was and we told him. Then he handed me a business card for his wife (she was shopping somewhere in the store he let us know) who is a child speech pathologist, just in case we ever needed those services. Wha??? He said that she works over off Holcomb Bridge and at that point I started to mentally shoot Michael a command to NOT mention that we happen to live near that area. My ESP worked for the time being, haha. The guy then goes on to brag about his kids a bit, he taught on the guitar already and the other one the harmonica (Sophia is giving him the side eye by now, ha!) and he can also tell that Sophia is smart...even though she hasn't uttered a peep, not that he has let her, or us for that matter. He even whipped out his phone and showed us some pictures of his boys, convinced that Sophia looked like one (twins...they both looked the same to me). Finally he started talking about some park they go to all the time and Michael blew the lid on the general locale of where we live...oops. But it seemed that by that point (I mean, we are talking a good 10 to 15 minutes later...well beyond the typical 'your daughter is cute' stranger chat) he was losing some steam and shook our hands and said bye to Sophia (complete with an I love you....SOOOO weird!!) and moved on....to the restroom. Guess his bladder couldn't handle any more chit-chat. Michael and I probably couldn't have handled any more awkwardness.
We shopped for another good half an hour, not that we needed anything else, but maybe more to avoid any more meet-ups with our new 'buddy'. And sure enough, we walked out just before him and his wife did and were able to make an escape to our car. Michael and I both decided it was probably the strangest encounter we'd had so far, brought on by our cute little outgoing Sophia!! Can't say she had too much to do with this one, though, haha. And I'm sure this will not be the last of these weird encounters!!
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