Babies and Why I Growl at Them

I went to the internet this morning looking for an answer to a question that I had. Knowing the internet as well as I do, I figured there would have to be some line of logic or posting that covered (if only in part) the topic to which I sought answers. To my dismay, I found several entries that were about what I was asking but no real answer to the questions I had. So, being disappointed with the internet I have decided to layout my question here and see if I may find a response in the madness I call my own.

Roughly three months ago my sister by association gave birth to another baby. This one is in the same lineage of Tiny Face but is far tinier than his current face. I will refer to the brother of Tiny Face here as Beany Cakes. Moving on, Beany Cakes being a baby does roughly four things all day. He poops, he eats, he sleeps, and of course he cries. The last of which is at such a pitch that my wolf like ears almost bleed when Beany Cakes decides he is upset about something. I put up with crying to a point because you know he is a baby. Though there are times where even the immortal level of patience I have is pushed to a brink. When I get to that point I regular joke about punching the said baby in the face. Because if anything punching babies is the best form of anger management. Side bar to explain this understanding:

Say someone comes up to me and says they are angry. I would then tell them to hold on to their emotions while I go and get a baby for them to punch. If they are a normal person they will most likely protest to the idea of punching a baby. I then return with said baby (where did I get it, don’t worry about where I got it). I then hold up the baby and say punch it. The angry person will most likely again protest and say that I am crazy for suggesting such a thing. I then put the baby down and ask them if they are still angry. A good deal of the time they say no, they are rather shocked about being asked to punch a baby, and where did I get that baby anyways? I pat them on the head and congratulate them on being cured of their anger. I walk off and they are happy having been cured. The baby I assume goes back to its family and lives a life of love and fortune knowing it helped to cure someone’s anger issues. 

Back on topic, when I find that Beany Cakes is crying at such a rate that my ears are about to explode, and he is unwilling to stop no matter how many times I hit him in his face I find that I start to growl. It rises like a guttural hollow sound from the base of my spine. Gathering strength and resonance from my gut it climbs furiously up the back of my throat. Then it springs forth from my mouth in a cavalcade of bestial understanding. I can tell you that I am unsure where the growl comes from or to as why it shows up like that. I can, however, tell you that when I do growl at Beany Cakes he stops crying.

 Now he does not stop crying because he is scared or because he is shocked at what I have done. It would appear that he likes it when I growl at him. I know this because his crying turns into smiling, and he responds at times with a laugh or a giggle. I, of course, continue to growl at Beany Cakes till either his parents come to tend to him, or he decides it is time to do something else. Normally what he means by doing something else is performing some bodily function that requires an adult like person to check his pants.

So, I have explained the action and now must explain the question. Why is it babies or my nephew (who is a baby) responds to my growling as he does? Does it have something to do with the tone of the growl? Does it mimic a sound that they heard while in the uterus? It is because as our higher brains tell us we are no longer animal we forget that in the base of our genetic code is the memory of animal instincts? Is Beany Cakes some weirdo that enjoys the mimicked tones of a beast? Or is it the look on my face when I growl, which is can only imagine is a mix of anguish and horror. There has to be a reason for it. Hence, that is the reason I went to the internet. It is also the reason I am disappointed with the internet.

When I went out searching, I used the most logical search string “why do babies react to growling?” I got a few posts on dogs growling at babies and parents being freaked out by it. I then made the search string simpler by asking “babies and growling.” What I got for the results here was where I found disappointment with the internet. A good deal of the links Google offered me were moms looking for help because their babies are growling. I thought this was funny, so I decided to see what the posts were about.

Come to find out there are a lot of moms and parents out there that are either annoyed or disturbed by a growl-like noise that their babies make. Mom’s complaining about how it sounds gross and annoying. Other mothers are blaming their husbands or baby daddies for teaching their babies how to do it. And finally there was one mother that complained about it to her doctor only to be told that her tiny dog was not in fact a human child and in this way growling was perfectly normal. As you can see, the internet lets me down. One it did not provide an answer to my question and two it did not do the risk of the growing number of wolfling children justice. Seriously, it is apparent that their number is growing which could lead us to Wolf War III and honestly we don’t have enough silver to survive this one. So, the question I have now is where do I get the answer to my first question, and also where do I go to buy large quantities of silver?

Finally, after my ranting, and taking several hours to write this I think I have come up with an answer. I growl at Beany Face, and he likes it because like his brother, and like myself he is weird. There must be something in my tone when I growl. Or it could be that I am joking as I do it; making faces and whatnot. It could just be that my growl is that good and he finds it funny that a man of my talent lives in the basement of his parents’ house and is not a millionaire. If that truly is the reason he is laughing, then I am making a note now to punch him in his fat baby face when I get home tonight.

All in all, it is a funny interaction between the two of us. He cries, and I growl. It goes back and forth. I find it funny and in this way wanted to know if there was some higher or medical like purpose behind it. Maybe we are all wolves from birth and as we age we are less likely to scratch behind our ears because we are not as flexible as we are at birth. It could just be that the innate beast like instincts we so desperately hide from the world are at our core the reason we have survived as a species. If it howls like a wolf, hunts like a wolf, growls like a wolf, then it might just be human… eventually.

To close, I wanted to make sure and add Tiny Face to this post. This weekend he watched me play Witcher 3, which was just me running around picking up plants and him yelling at me to go find a bear. It was worth mentioning because eventually I had to go and hunt down some spiders. He was not concerned until he saw that there were spider babies. The conversation then went like this:

“Why are you hunting spiders?”

“Because they are eating people and I need to make sure they don’t eat my butts.”

“Oh, is there a mama spider?”

“Yes, she is the big one in the back.”

“Oh…NO! Don’t kill the baby spiders!”

“Why?”

“They are calm, they aren’t doing anything.”

“WHAT? They are biting my butts. See look they are coming right at me.”

“No, Uncle Jeff, they are nice spiders. You are mean and you should not hurt them.”

“Um, no.”

“Um, yes.”

“Um, no.”

“Um, yes…”

It went on like this until he found it funny when I died because the spiders had eat my butts. This ended the argument over whether or not baby spiders are calm. The said spiders are pictured below, judge for yourself.