Candy for Babies... part 2

A conversation with my neighbor:

Neighbor: I heard that you feed your baby broccoli!
Me: Happily nodding my head in agreement. Yeah. She loves it!! It's one of her favorite foods!
Neighbor: Babies shouldn't eat broccoli. Don't feed it to her again.
Me: Confused. Why not? It's a healthy food, and she enjoys eating it.
Neighbor: It tastes disgusting. It stinks. And it will give her gas.
Me: But she likes it. I do too. It's not disgusting to her.
Neighbor: Babies need soft foods. Things that are easy on their stomachs. Babies need a lot of sugar. They need bread products made with white flour.
Me: Deciding that this is an argument I have no hope of winning... Oh. Well, you know best.

Two things I want to point out about this conversation:

1. One day a neighbor with a baby the same age as mine was complaining to me that she couldn't get her daughter to eat. She asked what I feed Elise (who was about a year old at the time). I told her a few things Elise liked. One of them was broccoli. Two days later the neighbor in the above conversation was over at my house. She had obviously heard the juicy gossip about my broccoli eating baby. We live in a 12 story building, with three flats on each floor. News about my family, like the fact that our baby eats broccoli, spreads like wild fire through all 36 homes in our building (and probably beyond that). I guess that since we're Americans almost everything we do becomes big news that is worthy of spreading.

2. "You know best." This is the polite way of saying, "I've heard what you have to say and although I probably don't agree, I'm not going to argue with you." Unfortunately, I learned this saying the hard way. Younger women like me should NOT verbally disagree with a woman their mother's age. Instead of showing us as capable intelligent people who can think for ourselves, it comes off as rude and disrespectful. Believe me, I've done it. Instead, I've learned to just nod my head, swallow my pride, and say, "You know best."