The unbearable tightness of bad jeans

My friends Lisa and Chevorne have a term for people with short legs: Ducks. This is because, with their stumpy little appendages, their bums appear to dangle just centimeters above the ground, at sharp odds with torsos that are the same length as everyone else's, in much the same manner as - you guessed it - a waddling duck.

I, sadly, am very definitely a duck. Don't get me wrong, there are undeniable advantages to this body type. I don't get uncomfortable on plane trips or during movies, and people travelling long distances with me in a car like me because they don't have to move their seats forward when I sit in the back.

But there are drawbacks, too. It's a matter of bad jeans.

Now, you find me a girl who enjoys shopping for jeans and I'll show you a girl who has never let a Ferrero Rocher pass her lips; a girl with such high self esteem that Maslow built his entire theory of self-actualisation around her. For the rest of us, however, jeans shopping is an exercise in self-flagellation. Worse, actually, as I would rather shave my shins with a cheese grater that had been dipped in salt, than stare at my cellulitey ass trying to shimmy into a pair of denims that, inevitably, will get stuck half mast around my giganti-hips. If I am to tackle the challenge of finding a pair that look good, it must be on a day when I am feeling invincible; when I have had only one brownie in the week; when my hair is straight and shiny rather than pulled into the half pony I favour when in a rush (a look that should be labelled the anti-Botox as it instantly makes me look like a middle aged tuckshop mom called Beryl)  and when I have, if not polished my toenails (because, with my lack of interest in grooming, that's an unlikely event), at least cut them.

Such days do not come about often.

My reluctance to invest time in finding the perfect pair has resulted in some horrible mistakes. It would appear that people with my hip size have much longer legs, as most of my jeans have ended well below my cankles, leaving me with three options: I can a) roll them four times, so that I have donutty bunches at the bottom of my pants, making it impossible to take neat steps with my feet in line with each other - instead, I have adopt a slightly more wide-legged gait; b) wear them long, so that I look like an old-fashioned Chinese mandarin with a mysterious and surprising penchant for hiding things in my pant legs or c) throw away my flats and wear high heels forever, embracing a circa-1990s, I-like-to-look-vaguely-corporate-even-on-weekends look.

I thought that my hunt for the perfect pair had come to an end on honeymoon. If you think about it, this was an auspicious time: I had just ceased to be a single girl, plucked from the desert of loneliness by my man. So, too, had I been rescued from the morass of bad denim by my chance visit to Diesel at the Tel Aviv airport. The jeans were a revelation: softest blue denim, a great length, snug around the waist, creating that elusive combination: comfort and good looks.

I would be able to wear them for another three months before I fell pregnant.

What happened after was nasty. I have nothing nice to say about the jeans I wore while pregnant; suffice to say that by the end of my 30 kilogram ordeal, the fuzzy black wasitband (jeans with a fold down waist - the horror!) had been washed so many times it had grown a fungus of bolletjies. Emerging from these beauts was a great occasion. But quickly it soured - their replacement was a pair of skinnies with a crotch that had a nasty habit of hanging around my knees, and pulling my knickers down with it. I felt utterly compromised when wearing them.

Thus, you can imagine my delight when I discovered, today, that I can fit into my dream Diesels once more. I would of course be more delighted if the frayed bits that were apparently included in the denim weave to give an artful shabby chic look hadn't given up the ghost - they've gone from frayed to falling apart, I can only imagine because the strain of trying to hold my thighs in was to much for cotton threads without the benefit of reinforcements. If these jeans were a person, they would be the puny IT guy who had entered a gym for the first time and was trying to benchpress 200kg.

They're going to take the pain, though. There's no way I'm going shopping for a new pair.


 

Don't grow up too fast, little girl

This weekend, Leya did something that broke my heart, had me crying at 3am on Sunday morning: she grew a tooth.

My gorgeous niece waited a full year before she started teething, so I honestly thought that we would be able to delight in Leya's tortoisey smile for some time to come. But no - it seems as though that baby face is going to change all too quickly (oddly, while most babies apparently grow the bottom front tooth first, Leya's tiny pearler is on the top jaw, so that when it has fully emerged she's going to look a little like a Disney crone).

How can this have happened so fast? It seems that just yesterday she was a minute blob with a decidedly Asian cast to her face and hair that grew in a helmet shape, starting at her left eyebrow, stretching around the back of her head and ending at the right. Not only that, but her hairline started at her eyebrows too. (We found it most amusing that a baby bearing the name of one of the world's most famous space characters should have an astronaut's headpiece fashioned entirely from her own hair.)

I remember how she used to glare at us, her snappish eyes darting from side to side and her diminutive hands clasped at the fingertips like a small but furious shareholder who was decidedly unimpressed by the results reported at the latest Board meeting. It was as though she found the world decidedly lacking, and was placing the blame solely at our door. "What do you think her personality will be like?" I asked James one morning and he, looking at her cross, hirsute little visage answered, "Angry and suspicious, I'm afraid."

How wrong he was. Leya has a grin for everyone: many's the time an onlooker has turned to me, awed and happy and said, "She smiled at me! Babies never smile at me!" It's really sweet that they feel favoured in this manner; far be it for me to tell them that my daughter is the world's most undiscriminating smiler.

Now that that smile is about to change, I feel bereft. It's just one step from here to her refusing to walk next to me when we go to Sandton City because she finds it embarrassing to have parents; and wearing a brown velour tracksuit when I force her to do so, in the time honoured tradition of children who believe that the best way to deflect attention when with their parents is to look ugly. Of course she won't always want to look ugly though; soon she'll be thinking about boys...and this sets my mind down a train of thought it just can't handle.

Is it any wonder that during tonight's Mommy Shuffle I warbled my way poignantly through 'Sunrise, Sunset, stumbling sadly over the words?

Drat that tooth!

Rice and other dirty four letter words

James has a little tale he likes to tell about me: during our first year together, I took him out for a romantic birthday dinner. We were both wearing our very nicest clothes and smiling a lot at each other - and then something happened that revealed the real me: the waiter gave us the dessert menus. Unable to choose from the list of delisheses, we decided to get two different dishes and share.

We both attacked James' pudding with gusto, making great gulping grunts of delight. Then, we turned our attention to the scrumptious little morsel waiting patiently on my side of the table. "Mmmmm," I swooned, "that's delicious." James, his spoon poised, waited for his invitation to dig in. "That's just outstanding," I muttered between lip licking. "Mmm mmm mmmm MMMMM." By now, he was looking a little agitated, wondering when I was going to slide the plate toward him for his share of the dessert - a moment which, as it turned out, simply didn't arrive. "Gosh, that was good," I said as I finished the last mouthful. That was when James realised that I had never had any intention of sharing; that I had only pretended to support his idea of going halves on each serving so that I could eat most of his dessert and all of mine, too.

No, it's not a flattering story; but it's one that illustrates the seriousness with which I take my food; a trait I appear to have passed on to my daughter.

When Leya was introduced to solids two weeks ago, I was warned that the going might be tough. "She'll pull all kinds of funny faces," the nurse told me. "She might gag, but you must just push on through," advised my sister (counsel I could thoroughly identify with, as many's the time I have felt positively ill because of the sheer volume I have ingested, yet, determined to continue until the last mouthful is down the hatch, I push on with the perseverance of a woman in a Nike ad).

As it turned out, we need not have worried. I had scarcely mixed up Leya's cereal when she seized the spoon from me and all but swallowed it whole. She has taken to food in a manner that does her maternal family - a group of people who think nothing of going out for coffee and cake seconds after the breakfast dishes have been cleared - most proud.

In fact, such is her enthusiasm that no matter how quickly I tried to feed her, I just can't shovel that cereal in fast enough. Hence, the establishment of my two-spoon production line - while Leya is munching down on one spoon, the second is already loading up the next mouthful. It's not actually necessary to present one spoon after the other; she quite likes having both proffered at the same time, so she can go from one to the other, her head darting quickly from side to side as if watching a tennis match on a miniature court.

Even then, it sometimes happens that proceedings do not take place at the speed she would like. At such times, Leya finds one of the blobs of cereal which has fallen to her bib, and sucks them off. Sometimes, she tries to eat her bowl. With an excitement that would not be out of place at a Roman feast, she happily squelches the cereal into her hair, mascaras it onto her eyelashes and mashes it between her toes. I, too, get covered in flying rice flakes, until I am covered in a crispy caul of cereal. Yesterday was a particularly messy day: Just as I brought Spoon Number Two, fully loaded, up to her mouth, a giant sneeze from Leya made the cereal fly even further. Jackson Pollack could not have been a better job.

The last stage of the meal involves removing my little girl, now covered in her own food coating like a breaded chicken schnitzel, from her Bumbo and placing her in the bath. This is no easy task, for two reasons: I'm still trying to avoid the giant gobs of cereal (a pointless exercise, really, as one or two extra dabs on my clothes will make no difference) and, in addition, Leya's chunksome thighs tend to get stuck in the legholes. As a result, this is usually a two-person job: one holds her seat down while the other gives her a hearty yank. Going it alone often means that baby and Bumbo arise as one solid unit.

There's no doubt that mealtimes are the ultimate nightmare for anyone who's even mildly tactile defensive. But they're also one of the greatest comedic events of my day.
 

Creepy things I do to my baby 2: The hand that rocks the cradle

So, let's talk stalking.

If you are a man reading this, and we used to have a relationship, you need to realise that, at some point, I have stalked you. Remember the 90s, when your phone rang a lot but there was never anyone on the other end? Oh yes there was; it was me, trying to find out if you were home - and, if you were, trying to fathom why you weren't phoning me. If we were at varsity together, you may have spied me walking a good couple of hundred meters out of my way to see if the light in your res room was burning. And if our fling happened in the past decade - well, what is Facebook for, really?

Now, there's no point really in stalking James since he's with me most of the time. And so I have turned my attentions to Leya. Well, not Leya herself per se; rather, her nanny. In fact, both of them together.

You see, I'm terribly jealous of Leya's nanny. She is a wonderful, old-fashioned type of nanny; the kind of lady with a giant laugh and an even bigger heart that Leya will reminisce about when she's all grown up and has babies of her own. She'll tell them how, when she was tiny, Nomonde used to make up songs for her; and shake her tinkly giraffe for her, pretending its was an ice cream van and she had to choose her favourite flavour; and how, when Leya was just a newborn and nothing I would do could stop her crying, Nomonde would get out of her bed late at night and soothe her within seconds.

All of which should make me love Nomonde - and make no mistake, I do. But I know that Leya loves her too, and - well, there's no way of putting this without sounding scary and psycho, so here goes: I want to be the person she loves best.

Yes, I do realise that sounds like the admission of an Edward Norton character. But here's something even worse: so crazed am I by the sound of Leya and Nomonde having fun and laughing together that I follow them throughout the house. That's right: I will leave whatever I'm doing to casually saunter past Leya's room, hover outside the door, and try nonchalantly to peek in. Of course, I can't help but feel silly doing this - there's no way you can feel good about yourself while spying on your baby.

Inevitably, my jealousy has found expression in a furious spirit of competitiveness. I've explained before how, when Leya cries after waking up, I run with a speed that would make Bolt blush to reach the cot. Nomonde meanders over too, and together, we transport Leya to her change mat. That's right, it takes two of us to walk two meters and place a baby on a compactum.

Now it's time to dress her; a job that falls under Nomonde's ambit; but, coldly, I shoulder her out the way. But what's this? Leya isn'transfixed by me; instead, she's still beaming over my shoulder at her nanny. What to do to reclaim her attention? Ah, an orangatang-like shriek should do the trick. "Leeeeeeyyyyyyyaaaa", I scream piercingly. At this point, I think Nomonde has wised up to the fact that we're rivals for affection. "Baaaaaaaaaaaaabbbyyy" she hollers. I lose, because Nom can ululate, and I can't. But that doesn't mean I don't give it my best shot, and for two minutes, the house reverberates with the screeches of two grown women making nonsensical sounds, garbling and gurbling as we strain to be the first to make Leya smile, until our throats are raw and scratchy.

Sometimes, I think that Nom has ventured into the realm of psychological warfare. Just the other day, she and Leya were walking outside when I hear, outside my window, "such big smiles, Leya. Why are you smiling so much?" Hrrrumph, I though to myself. Why are you smiling so much? Why are you having fun without me? I stood to peer out the window and identify the cause of such mirth. But there was nothing. No smile even - which made made me wonder if Nom had made it all up, in the way of a teenage girl exaggerating her Saturday night to make her friends envious.

None of this is sane, I know. It's slightly shameful; I know that too. But whoever said that love and sense walk hand in hand?

Creepy things I do to my baby

One of the first things you notice about Leya is her mouth. It looks like an adult's kisser has been planted on her baby face: her lips are all pouty and rosebuddish, with a cupid's bow the likes of which is usually not seen except on the painted faces of 1920s screen idols.

Needless to say, this is a mouth that just screams, "kiss me, mommy!" (Well, not really. At the moment it just screams like a parrot; sometimes, when I wake up to hear Leya's squeals and chortles, I feel like I must have mislaid myself at the Montecasino Bird Park during the night.) BUT - I know that if she could give kisses, she certainly would. And so, as all good mothers should, I lend a helping hand. After her 2am feed, when Leya is sleeping and has no idea of what I am subjecting her to, I wrap one tiny arm around my waist as if she is cuddling into me. It's absolutely delicious; I feel like she and I are having a real snuggle. Of course, during her waking hours, she is far too busy to do this, so it's precious time indeed. Then, after staring at her for a good 10 minutes, I bend towards her tiny face and smoonch my cheek onto her mouth, so that it is as if she has decided to give me a smacker. I do this several times, until she starts to frown in her sleep and pummel me a little with her tiny fists, and that's when I return her to her cot.

Yes, I suppose it is a little creepy to force kisses from a sleeping baby. But that's nothing compared to how I stalk her and her nanny throughout the day...which is a story for another time.
 

Nigellisms

Nigella. I absolutely love her. Who else could make cooking look so saucy (no pun intended). While I have always felt sorry for the ingredients that have given their lives so that I can enjoy my fillet pasta, I picture that same cow mooing with happiness at the privilege of being masterfully massaged with olive oil by Nigella's skilled hands.

There are some parts of her cooking technique that worry me, however. The constant tossing of those glossy locks - should she not put a hair net over that mane? That's just an accident waiting to happen. No matter how luscious a tart, no one likes sinking their teeth into a pastry and finding a stringy hair attached to their lips. I know this, because back in my childhood, I bit into a romany cream baked by my granny, and as I pulled the biscuit away from my mouth I felt the sensation of a hair dragging across my tongue; a feeling so repulsive it has become indelibly burned on my memory and has given me a phobia that makes me check every meal for hair ever since (sadly, this proves the dictum that if you seek, you shall find, as I almost inevitably find some keratin strands in whatever I'm eating). I can't even tell you how nervous the batting of her eyelids makes me feel. No one wants to crunch down on someone else's mascara-coated lashes.

The heaving chest, too, is a tad worrisome - at least for Nigella's domestic. We all know that a jutting bosom makes for the perfect drip tray, and I can only imagine that Nigella's cleaning staff have had some battles removing the tougher stains resulting from her boobs catching bits of falling ingredients.

But it is her way with words that captivates me most. Here, then, are some of my favourite Nigellisms:
- "Look at their chocolatey little bodies" - You'd think she's tooking about gorgeously fat black babies here, but no - it's dessert
- "Hessian woven strands" - that's spaghetti to you and me
- "I find that gooseberries are far more proud" - Yes, I probably do have a dirty mind, but for some reason this makes me think of the panting breasts of Mills & Boon heroines
- "Look at them reclining on their duvet of cream" - Actually, perhaps it is not me who has the dirty mind
- "I just love this art deco colour scheme, jet and gold" - For heaven's sake, it's only a pavlova!

People who comment on other people's babies

I've said it before, but I'm constantly amazed at how the world's attitude towards you changes when you are pregnant or have a young baby.

When I was toddling around, dragging my 30 extra kilograms of self, I was appreciative of the sympathetic glances that came my way; although slightly less so when strangers asked, with a freaky awed expression in their voices - as if they were blessed to come into contact with my fertility - if they could rub my stomach, a region too uncomfortably close to my swimsuit area for me to feel ok with being touched by anyone except my husband.

Now that I am toting Leya around, the glances I get are even more beatific. It's as if people have stumbled across Mary in their midst, and they can't believe sher is ding something as commonplace as having a cappucino. And I won't lie; as someone who frankly enjoys a spot of attention, I rather enjoy it, and I find it especially gratifying when people compliment my daughter (as well they should).

But when their comments go in the opposite direction - well, that's a different story altogether. I have just come from a breakfast where a man I have never met before walks up to me and inspects Leya with a shrewd eye, like a sheep farmer at a Free State auction. Immediately this strikes me as odd; attention from women I expect, but when men - and elderly men at that - want to discuss my baby, I wonder why they are not more interested in stocks and bonds, even if that makes me a chauvinist. "Hmm," says the man speculatively, "what's that on her wrist?"

"A birthmark," I answer, still bemused.

"Ah," he says, "that's alright then." My hackles rise slightly, I must confess. Am I to be relieved that this stranger does not mind my daughter having a birthmark? Has he been so troubled by it?

Now he leans in, confidingly. "She's a bit chubby, isn't she," he asks. Now, the answer to that is self-evident. Leya is a gloriously fat baby. The rolls on her thighs are so poly that it looks like she has three 'wu-wus' (as her dad calls them); her hands feel like soft feather quilts. Her plumpness is delicious, and I love it. "Yes," I say proudly. I must at this point mention that the man in question has a double chin so loose and wobbly it looks like a goitre cut loose from its moorings and trying to escape his neck - but, despite his own physical shortcomings, he says to me, "Well, as long as she loses it all."

WHAT??? Since when does it matter if babies are fat? Personally, I feel sorry for thin babies, but I would never walk up to a mom and say "Shame, your child looks like a brittle twig jutting from your hip." Since when is it ok to cast negative aspersions on people's relatives and their looks? Would he like it if I went up to him and said, "Tough luck with what happened to your daughter's face their, chum. Ah well, there's always rhinoplasty."

Does anyone else get indignant about this, or am I just defensive and sensitive, and perhaps in need of an extra hour's sleep?

The scariest thing in the world

A little while ago, James made us watch The Woman in Black. He said he chose it because he thought it would be amusing to watch Harry Potter in a grown up role - and, indeed, it's a little difficult to buy the boy wizard as a bereaved 30-year-old (although, in one scene, it did look as though he had a scar on his forehead - this time, for some uncreditable reason, the MasterChef symbol).

If you haven't watched the film, it's heavy on the melodrama; a ghost story complete with chairs that rock even though there is no one sitting on them, toy monkeys clanging cymbals and vacant eyed girls in Victorian dress. In a roundabout way, it's about a haunted house, with all the occult action taking place in the nursery. A sublime choice for someone who has to get up to breastfeed during the night, especially someone whose imagination is as mild and orderly as Charlie Sheen.

I first started taking fright in my house when I saw the cellar. It's deep enough for me to stand upright, and runs the full length of the house. It was my sister who made me think of it as something more sinister than an awesome place to store wine: "What if thieves hide in here?" she asked. I now realise that if someone is prepared to hunker down somewhere dark and dank for hours, hack their way through wooden floors, then drag away our TV without waking us, they probably deserve their loot.

However, her comment did get me thinking, not so much about thieves as ghosts: what if there is a resident phantom lurking down below? Many's the time I've waited for James to come home, terrified that said spectre might float through the floorboards.

I'm equally scared of our bathroom; not only because it has a full length mirror in the shower (a terrifying sight), but because it has glass doors leading outside, meaning that anyone meandering past can see in. My particular fear about this room was again fuelled by a film, this time one starring Jonathan Rhys Meyer as a possessed and demonic meanie. Since watching it, I have been unable to stop imagining Jonathan's icy blues staring at me while I'm on the loo, to the point where I feel really shy every time I wee and try make it all happen as quickly as possible. I am still a little scared that such a scenario should transpire, although I realise that if it did, it really is more likely to be a criminal peeking in, and that would just be embarrassing. Should this happen, I do hope that I really am just making a wee, and I dread the policeman asking me what I was doing at the time of the break-in.

But I digress. Now that we have Leya, the baby monitor has created all manner of food for my phobias. I lie there at night, imagining that I can hear someone say "Hello" over the airwaves. It's doubtful that any intruder - real or otherwise - would start their intrusion with a courteous greeting, but there you go.

The reality, though, is that there is something very scary lurking in the nursery at night - and it's Leya herself. Anyone who has walked into a baby's room at 3am, only to be greeted by a giant toothless grin, will know what I am talking about. These are times when no amount of Grand Old Duke of York helps. Leya wants to PLAY. Nor is it possible to bounce her to sleep on the gym ball - I've tried, only but found its impossible to balance with one's eyes shut. I've tried feeding her without making eye contact, but have discovered that she has an uncommonly compelling stare. I begin to feel quite juvenile and churlish, like a child ignoring her best friend for no good reason.

That's the thing: Leya just looks so delighted to see me. And the truth is that, if my eyes weren't gummed shut by sleep, I would be delighted to see her, too. But there we sit, in a tortured stand-off, her happily gurgling, me groaning and yawning, until 5am.

And then, suddenly, the tide turns. Her excitement at seeing me turns, in a second, to rage. Her tiny face turns puce and she bellows, her fury bordering on indignation, for all the world as if I am the one who insisted on a midnight rendezvous. Now it's her that's exhausted and me that's oulling out all the stop to mollify until, finally, she slips back into slumber, and I'm able to use the last reserves of my energy to leopard crawl back into bed.

All of which makes me think: surely no encounter with a ghost could be quite as wearisome

 

The giant vajayjay and other horror stories

I have to ask myself why I watched Channel 184 last night. There I was, all tucked up in bed, when my sister advised me that Embarrassing Bodies would be featuring a giant vagina. Well, I was intrigued - wouldn't you be? I mean, what exactly constitutes a giant vagina? Immediately, I thought of that tunnel one comes across when travelling to Limpopo.

Now, I am in no way proud to admit this, but even with Level 9 exhaustion, I climbed out of bed and back on to the couch where, just an hour ago, I had been treated to another view of Gordon Ramsay's bum (Why? Why has Ramsay's rump become a superstar in its own right? Again I say: is this a man for whom it is necessary to strip off every five seconds?)

But Gordon's derreriere was nothing compared to the sight that was in store. For the uninitiated, Embarrassing Bodies is a series all about the grotesqueries that we usually only admit to after the third cocktail, and only if our drinking companions are our very closest friends, or even share our DNA. Even then, when one awakens the next day and recalls recounting, blow by blow, the finer points of one's flatulence problem or third nipple, one feels not so much liberated as steeped in shame, and greatly encouraged to check out to move town.

Not so the people on Embarrassing Bodies: the producers have somehow conned a bunch of folk into believeing that the very health issues they have kept secret for years should now be shown, not only to a doctor, but to the whole world; the idea being that they visit the show's medical  experts, who can be found hanging out in a special trailer waiting for people apparently desperate to be on TV, but no good at hosting dinner parties, to show them their verucas and halitosis. Think of it as Come Be Repulsive and Misshapen With Me.

Ms. Salami Down A Passage Way is a case in point: in all honesty, I'm freaked out by the voyeuristic streak that made me sit down and watch something so intimate - and, even worse, that got a good giggle out of it. But if that's bad, what about the producers who felt compelled to flight something like this, knowing that this worst kind of Sideshow Bob would boost viewing figures in a way that a programme about, I don't know, good old fashioned romance between a man and a normally endowed woman wouldn't. And as for the lady with the large labia - clearly, this is something very painful for her. I'm just not sure why, when she's been reluctant to share with boyfriends her little - oh, sorry, gigantic - problem, she decided to skip the gynae appointment and go straight for the money shot, to be viewed by millions.

What made it even worse were the pithy little comments, replete with puns, that British reality presenters seem to be so fond of. But, while it may sound cheesy to say "Will Tracey and Dom sizzle like the steak she just cooked for him" on Dinner Date, telling us that "Mary's roomy bits have her and her husband sleeping in seperate rooms" is not quite the same.

That all said, I've lost my appetite for spying on things that in a more genteel era would have been kept under one's hat (or knickers, as the case may be). Perhaps it's not necessary to describe a pregger as being "in the family way", but in my mind, it's equally unnecessary to have a gander at the parts involved in getting her that way.