It's your responsibility to keep your baby from annoying others.

I say this because during assembly today, we had several African speakers for Francophone week. In the middle section near the back was a woman with her toddler and her baby. Her rather chatty baby. The kid wasn't exceptionally loud, but in the quiet theater, the noise carried quite well. The speakers were not all exceptional at English, and these repeated interruptions kept me from understanding them. Plus it was completely distracting. Not just for me, everybody in the theater kept looking back at her. You would think that the mother would get the message with hundreds of eyes upon her, especially after the baby screamed.

To her credit, she did seem to notice that her baby was annoying. But instead of taking the baby out of the theater, she simply told the baby to shush. This never worked, of course, but she kept at it. The Upper School Head was sitting next to her, but didn't say anything, which bugged me.

I love babies. Our 8^th grade English teacher had a baby, and had a lot of fun with her. But as much as I like babies, there are times when I don't want them around. Asking a person with a baby to keep the baby quiet is no different from asking people to turn their cell phones off. If they cannot handle it, they can easily leave. In this woman's case, she could have easily listened from outside the theater room. If she could not afford to leave the presentation, she should not have brought a baby.