What Gender Is It?
Monster's sis is up the duff, and the time came the other day for The Baby Shower. This necessitated the Monsters Two traipsing the aisles of kidswear in search of romper suits and such, combined with a hyper-awareness of all things child-related. It is SCARY out their in Normal Hettie World. Kiddies t-shirts say things like 'In case you are wondering-- I'm a boy'(lest the fairy wings he insists on wearing to the supermarket cast doubt on his sex I guess) and 'Daddy's Little Cupcake'(pink, so guess who this was for? And need I mention that the cake illustrated was topped with a CHERRY?!?). Grrr.
Still, the shower itself was LOTS of fun! We all bought plain baby clothes to decorate, plus an assortment of fabric pens, stencils, sequins, iron-on patches, felt, glue etc etc. We sat about drinking champagne and stitching and gluing and painting. Monster decorated a jumpsuit with a big green dinosaur patch, a felt bone and paw prints, spines down the back and claws on the feet (which she stitched on). I prettied up a bib with a big orange crab and lots of stenciled beach motifs, a hot pink jumpsuit with zebra-print patches and coloured pom poms and a tail (pom pom and ribbons) and another bib with red drops, black and red sequins, and black lettering spelling out 'Spit happens'. We were mighty pleased with our efforts.
And I even managed to keep my mouth shut* when one of the older ladies expressed that we should make sure that we didn't make anything too girly, in case the kid turns out to be a (straight non-metrosexual) boy, and as we didn't know the sex of it we should err on the side of masculine. As apparently it is much better to be a masculine girl than a feminine boy. Obviously there could be nothing worse than being mistaken for the Weaker Sex. Bloody hell- what century is it again?
* Cool parents who won't be inflicting any of that crap on the kid, so wasn't worth spoiling the day for the mum by having a huge fight with her ma-in-law. If it had been in other circumstances, OF COURSE I would have, umm, POLITELY suggested that I hoped she wasn't going to inflict her misogynist views on it whatever genital configuration it happened to show up with at any point.
Still, the shower itself was LOTS of fun! We all bought plain baby clothes to decorate, plus an assortment of fabric pens, stencils, sequins, iron-on patches, felt, glue etc etc. We sat about drinking champagne and stitching and gluing and painting. Monster decorated a jumpsuit with a big green dinosaur patch, a felt bone and paw prints, spines down the back and claws on the feet (which she stitched on). I prettied up a bib with a big orange crab and lots of stenciled beach motifs, a hot pink jumpsuit with zebra-print patches and coloured pom poms and a tail (pom pom and ribbons) and another bib with red drops, black and red sequins, and black lettering spelling out 'Spit happens'. We were mighty pleased with our efforts.
And I even managed to keep my mouth shut* when one of the older ladies expressed that we should make sure that we didn't make anything too girly, in case the kid turns out to be a (straight non-metrosexual) boy, and as we didn't know the sex of it we should err on the side of masculine. As apparently it is much better to be a masculine girl than a feminine boy. Obviously there could be nothing worse than being mistaken for the Weaker Sex. Bloody hell- what century is it again?
* Cool parents who won't be inflicting any of that crap on the kid, so wasn't worth spoiling the day for the mum by having a huge fight with her ma-in-law. If it had been in other circumstances, OF COURSE I would have, umm, POLITELY suggested that I hoped she wasn't going to inflict her misogynist views on it whatever genital configuration it happened to show up with at any point.
Labels: gender
posted by Zoo at 7:13 pm
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