Babies spend a LOT of time on people's backs here!

I saw the cutest thing yesterday. This little two-year-old girl walked by me and I noticed that she had a blue piece of foam tied to her back. I thought,“Ooooooh, how cute! She’s playing house. She wants to be just like her Mom, carrying her “makeshift doll” on her back.” She had the technique down, too. When the moms do the whole, “untie the wrap, grab the baby and swing them to the front  in one quick motion” maneuver, she did it. TWO years old and she had it down (oh, the beauty of learning by observation). At one point I noticed that her little ”foam baby” was laying on the ground, so I told her to bring the wrap and her foam baby (yup, you can boss kids around here), so that I could help her tie it back on. As soon as she handed me the chunk of foam, she was already bending forward (again, she had the technique down!) so that I could easily place the foam and tie the wrap accordingly.

 Awwwww. How precious.

Or so I thought.

I pointed this out to my friend sitting near by saying, “Look! She’s taking care of her little “baby”, carrying it around on her back like African mama’s do.” She laughed (out loud. literally.) and said, “Ohhh, that just means that her Mom’s expecting another baby. That’s just one of the ways that moms prepare their little girls for a lot of responsibility once the baby comes. They take care of the baby while their mama is off carrying water, cooking, going to the market, or doing another one of a thousand things that need to be done. The foam square is just what they use in the beginning as the young child adjusts to having something on their back. With time they will change the object in order to increase the weight, so that the child’s back will be strong enough to support the weight of a newborn.

I had NO idea!

Can you imagine? At such a young age, even!

So what I thought was “the most adorable thing ever”, turned out to be {surprise, surprise}, yet another insight into a foreign world of ideas, reasonings and concepts.

It was still pretty darn cute to watch though. Well, except for the part where I spotted the foam baby lying “face down” in the dirt. Terrible parenting skills. I’ll tell you what, she’s going to need some in-depth parenting classes to break her of that habit!

Oh, the lessons we learn.