This afternoon, as I was ambling through the French Quarter, two young, extremely attractive smiling young women wearing short skirts and halter tops came running at me. They stopped mere inches away and extended their arms as if to caress me. My first thought was: “Still got the moxie!” My second (more accurate) thought was: “Oh yeah. The baby.”

It was Ella they were after, of course, who at that moment was dangling from the Baby Bjorn and drifting off to sleep in a way that the two young women found absolutely, as they exclaimed in their sultry Spanish accents, “Adooooooorable.”

They weren’t the only ones this weekend. There were the hot French oncologists in the elevator, and the bikini-clad college students who snuck into the hotel swimming pool. They just can’t seem to keep away from me — as long as I’m holding Ella. Wouldn’t you know it: at the moment when trying to pick up strange women is at its most inconceivable, I have the ultimate babe magnet. I’m pretty sure that qualifies as “actual irony”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001941.html, doesn’t it?