Buddha Babies And Baptisms

Well, last night was the big night. Samantha Ann was baptized in the Catholic Church. Michael is Catholic, I’m Buddhist, so I’m fairly ambivalent about this. It was something he wanted done, so I said okay. Of course, you know who ended up making all the arrangements to make sure this happened, don’t you?

Both sets of grandparents came down for the occasion, as did my sister Carolyn. She’s the godmother, my dad is the godfather. The eight of us (nine including Sam) took up most of a pew at the church. There was another family sitting in the row before us also having their baby baptized. Father Hannah was very nice about going over everything with all of us, although he almost baptized Sam as Matthew and Matthew as Sam. That would have been funny, but probably only to me. The other baby, Matthew, was just nine weeks old and two months premature. He was the tiniest thing. Father Hannah just sprinkled him with water from the font. Sam, however, is going on eleven months and is a huge healthy chunk of baby (she looks like a miniature King Kong, really). So she got the full dunking treatment. That meant I had to take off her diaper when we got up to the font, before handing her to Father Hannah. Then he held her up, backside toward the congregation, before putting her in the water. There was a lot of giggling over Sam’s dimply little butt cheeks, and I can safely say she is now the only member of the family to ever moon an entire church congregation. She seems quite proud of that.

In any event, she’s been baptized. We went to dinner at Johnny Carrino’s afterwards, where Sam spent over an hour stuffing pasta and bread into her gullet. I swear, I’ve never seen a baby eat as voraciously as Sam does. She’s skinnied up lately, and I think she’s deliberately trying to put the weight back on. Makes me think she’ll turn out to be Buddhist like me in spite of the baptism. She wants her round little Buddha belly back, to go with her round little Buddha nature. Ohm.