The thread over on Life in General about dads being "allowed" to "babysit" their own kids reminded me of another conversational gambit that we found annoying when our kids were little.
Right after our first was born, we went to a wedding, leaving her in the care of my two best friends (they were both so excited to spend time w/ her that DH & I joked about whether her arms would be longer when we got home from them doing a tug-of-war with her).
At the wedding, about 5 people approached us to say, as the first words out of their mouth, "Who's watching the baby?" Some of these folks used a sort of challenging tone, which was frustrating; it felt like they felt they had a right to demand that we justify ourselves. Or like they thought it was shocking we'd not attend the wedding (or whatever) without the kid; or that they didn't trust us to properly choose someone to care for our child.
And with all of them, the next minutes of conversation were them quizzing us about the babysitter of choice or talking about how it can be hard to find someone trustworthy.
It kept going, for years.
Every now and then I'd try something like replying, "Is there a reason you wanted to know?" But that just kept the conversation going.
Until, after the 2nd kid was about 2, I figured something out that just shut that conversation down.
I started answering, "Oh, we just left them home alone. I figure DD is 4, she can get her brother a cracker if he's hungry. And really, what's going to happen? They're not going to burn the house down." My DH played along and threw in other nonsense, over-the-top stuff. "We left her money for Chinese food; she knows where the store is."
They gave up the conversation. And then we had the usual "how are you" stuff to talk about. And it didn't get used as a conversation opener much anymore.
(I've just now realized--I wonder how much that played into my difficulty in getting DH to look beyond family members for babysitters...)