Today, we brought August to an elegant Saturday lunch on the Upper East Side. There was a cheese and salad course, and there were fine wines. Our hosts even trotted out linen napkins for the occasion.

August did his best to behave. He sat nicely in our laps (Michael and I traded him off) and he didn’t drool too terribly much on our hosts’ white sofa. It helped that we’d dressed August in one of his finer pairs of corduroy trousers (a change of pace from his usual tracksuit bottoms), even if his shirt did keep rolling up under the armpits to reveal his itty-bitty belly button.

But after an hour or so, August got FED UP. He was tired and wanted to kick things. We tried putting him to sleep in the car seat which he protested violently, so we handed him over to our kind friend Lauren to be rocked until his eyelids closed.

Which they did. The eyelids, I mean.

And then? Then came the snores.

My child is five months old and he … snores? Well, kind Lauren thought it was ADORABLE. “Come over here,” she said, “so you can hear him snore! It’s so cute!”

And you know what? It was adorable. It was completely and utterly, squishily, outrageously CUTE. Little, tiny, barely audible snorelets like the noise a newborn piglet might make.

Now, if August had been a grown-up and snored in a social setting it would have been just about the furthest thing from cute. Know how you feel when the guy next to you on the plane starts snoring up a storm with his mouth gaping wide? Ugh.

But it turns out there’s an absolute avalanche of cute things a baby can get away which a grown-up just can’t.

For example:

Cellulite butt — Charming for a baby; far from charming for an adult
Farts in public — Always worth remarking on (the louder the funnier); Not so with an adult
Porky thighs — Adorable for an infant; not so adorable later on
Robust, gobbling appetite — Sign of health in a baby; sign of gluttony/greed (Seven Deadly SINS) in an adult
Thumb-sucking — Pretty cute for an infant; pretty disturbing for an adult
Paunchy tummy — Cuddle-worthy for a baby; Pinch-worthy for an adult
Exposed belly button — Cute for a baby; TMI for an adult

And that’s just for starters.

Is it all really so cloyingly cute? Or has evolution just whipped our minds into thinking so?