the eye

while at the park the other day, i put joss down on the blanket and went to the swings with jayla. there was a hispanic family that was sitting on the picnic tables with their 6 mo old daughter watching us walk past. im pushing jayla on the swing and glance up to see that same fam walking over and unloading their little girl from her stroller on to josslynns blanket. now, remember, this baby is all by herself, k... they just start talkin to joss and have their girl sittin, chillin on the blanket with her. i walked over and started talkin(i was only 5 steps away, just not sittin there with her on the blanket). found out their names and they wanted to know how old she was. of coarse the next statement that comes after her age is"wow, shes so big." this i know. state the obvious, please. the mom checks out joss' legs and then tells her husband to come feel these legs, so solid. so the husband does! if i were to ever walk up to a random family and start checkin out the baby, jimmy would have already walked away! okay, i thought this to have been such a weird situation, so im tellin my partners at work about it. just so happens one of my partners is mexican and she tells me that its probably this thing they call "the eye" or "ojo." its their belief if you look or stare at a baby and dont go over and touch that baby after looking hard at them, then the baby will get a bad vibe or spirit and they dont sleep and are restless at night. she goes on to tell me that we were lucky that these people came by. it happened to her and her son just recently where her son would not sleep and they couldnt figure out why. she ends up calling her mom and her mom tells her to do this eye thing. shes like no, so mom does it for her. what you do is you wave or lightly rub an egg over the baby head and chest while saying a prayer. you then crack that egg into a bowl of water and the egg should have a bubble (the ojo) in it. this is to represent the bad spirit coming out of the baby. this is true, we asked the girls on my unit if they had heard of the eye and all of them knew what it was. pretty crazy, may explain why these strange people felt they had to come over and touch the baby. if my baby wasnt such a cute lil heffa, i dont think those people would have even been staring so hard;) that was something new i learned about another culture...i never knew that??? so if you read this, then you too, have learned something new and different today. watch out for the eye if you have a most adorable little kid that everyone wants to stare at. i told jimmy that i might need him to do "the eye" to me every night before bed cuz im sure people are lookin hard at my fine self that i would go days without sleep;)