Spent Saturday night in Baltimore, at my twentieth college reunion, and it was a pleasant surprise. Nobody appears to have gone to hell or fallen apart, at least physically (those people probably stay home, come to think of it), and my wife and kid had a good time meeting people. Afternoon luncheon, campus tour, evening cocktail party, over and out.

Which brings me to my point: I experienced something else new at that final event. We were the only ones who brought a baby. He wasn’t badly received–in fact, lots of old friends cooed over him–and he behaved like a champ. But I have never been That Guy before, and an hour into the event, he was getting sleepy and restless, causing his mother some definite stress, which spilled over to me. It didn’t wreck my evening, or anyone else’s, but I spent the whole party feeling as though a clock was ticking, which I suppose it was: the amount of time left before he melted down. Which he never did do–we got him back to the hotel and into his crib, and that was more or less that.

My particular stance here at DadWagon has been that babies barely belong in restaurants and bars, so how could I justify hauling him to a loud cocktail party? Chalk it up to simple ignorance: I figured that there would be plenty of people there with tiny kids. Turns out everyone else in my graduating class either (a) married and spawned five or ten years before I did, or (b) never had kids at all. Oooops.