Anna is not a baby. She is three and a half years old, potty trained, talking in pages worth of dialogue and on the cusp of reading. She sleeps in a bed, and is going to "big girl school" in the fall. And if all this doesn't matter, she remains three and a half years old. Anna is not a baby.

My in-laws seem to have difficulty on this issue. They insist on refering to her as The Baby, which I really don't understand on so many levels. (For one thing, she wasn't the baby for almost a year while we had a foster baby staying with us.) My mother-in-law asks when we are bringing The Baby over to see her or when she can come and visit The Baby. And as much as I gently correct her or playfully ask Anna (in front of my mother-in-law) "Anna are you a baby or a big girl?" and Anna dutifully replies "I'm a big girl," my mother-in-law still insists on refering to Anna as The Baby.

That's her name, by the way. The Baby. I think maybe once in a blue moon when Anna's being introduced does she say "this is Anna." But now that I think of it, she says "this is The Baby" just as much.

There are two things that bother me here. Three actually.
1: Anna is not a baby. She is three and a half and really does not in any way fall under the category of "baby"
2: Anna has a name. The Baby is not her name. Please use her name.

The last thing that bothers me is the very fact that this bothers me at all. Why do I care what my mother-in-law calls my kid? Why does it matter to me so much? Why do I try so hard to get her to say A-N-N-A and not The Baby? Why does it bother me? It honestly bothers me that it bothers me, and yet it does. It just does.