A mum has shared pictures of her own ‘funny looking’ baby but says other parents have taken offense.
When Emily Crossan, 31, was looking through old pictures of her son Isaac, she saw that he hadn’t yet ‘formed into his own face’ when he was just a few months old.
The mum-of-two, from Rugeley, Staffordshire, says she was ‘blinded by love’ at the time but has to admit now that young Isaac ‘wasn’t the most attractive.
She posted the photos with a parenting club in the hopes of making other parents laugh at her baby’s goofy expressions.
Many people acknowledged that infants have a strange appearance and posted photos of their own babies who appeared to be a little odd.
But one woman branded the post ‘disgusting’ for calling an ‘innocent’ baby ugly.
‘How can you call your child ugly?’ the woman asked and said she was ‘standing up for all newborns who are ridiculed.’
Others hit back, calling the commenter a ‘triggered Karen’ and telling her to ‘get a grip.’
Emily, the mother of Isaac, three, and Isabelle, six, dismissed the criticism, saying she loves her kid “more than anything in the world” and looks forward to laughing at the photos with him when he’s older.
Emily said: ‘At the time I thought he was the most beautiful thing in the world, a perfect little newborn.
‘It wasn’t until I was flicking through old photos recently that I thought “what was I thinking!”
‘He was so funny looking and definitely not the most attractive baby in the world – I was clearly blinded by motherly love at the time.
‘But he grew into his face and he’s so different now a proper little cutie.’
‘The older he got the more he grew into his face and by six months he had grown out of that funny-looking stage.’
Despite Isaac’s ‘ugly baby’ stage, polite family and friends never mentioned it to Emily out of politeness.
She said: ‘When he was very little he was very funny looking and as he got a bit older he just got chunkier.
The intensive care nurse is used to seeing “funny-looking infants” at work and understands that it’s a typical occurrence that they all outgrow.
‘I see a lot of funny-looking newborns at my job, it’s just one of those things and they grow out of it.
‘No one ever said anything to me about it at the time but they wouldn’t dare would they?’
Other mums agreed, saying all newborns look like ‘swollen potatoes’ for a while and calling them ugly doesn’t mean they aren’t loved.
Despite facing a backlash from her post, Emily refuses to ‘take herself too seriously’ and urges others, especially parents, to learn to laugh at the little things as well.
She said: ‘We’re all in the same boat as parents and it’s hard work so you have to see the funny side of things and be able to laugh about stuff because otherwise, it would get too much.’
