three pieces of parenting advice for kate middleton.

Hello Kate!

As you snuggle that new, yummy little bundle of royal joy (now, we have learned, you have named George) I realize that, even for someone who probably has her own staff of child rearers within an arm’s length, you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed. That’s okay. Contrary to your life circumstances, this is completely normal.

In all your abundant down time, please take a moment to read my three biggest pieces of advice for surviving your first year of motherhood. After all, I AM a mother of a one year old now, so I basically know everything.

will_kate

1. try to breastfeed.

Not only is it best for that little future king, and the snuggles are so great, and it’s cheaper than formula (LOLOLOLOL LIKE YOU EVEN NEED TO WORRY ABOUT THAT) but it also will help you speedily drop the three pounds of baby weight you gained. And don’t worry if it takes you and George a while to get used to it. It took my son and me three weeks to really get it down to a science. Also, don’t worry if you can’t breastfeed or decide you don’t want to. It doesn’t make you any less of a mother. So long as you are feeding your son SOMETHING, you’re good. But regardless of what you do, people (tabloids?) are going to have an opinion. Which brings me to my next piece of advice…

2. comparison is the thief of joy.

You may have royal girlfriends who are giving birth around the same time as you and so you naturally compare George to their kids’ growth and demeanor. Or maybe you know people who had children a little bit before you so they ask you questions about George’s behavior/development/whatever. Or maybe you’re curious about something so you Google it. JUST DON’T. It will steal every ounce of baby-inspired joy you have in your body. The second you ask someone something about their kid, or Google something about “normal milestones”, you’ll be freaking out because George isn’t sleeping all the way through the night yet or talking soon enough or walking fast enough or using the “pincer grasp” or spelling out complete sentences in sign language on his first birthday. It’s poison. Go with your gut instincts. No one knows that kid better than you do.

3. the first year is not indicative of your child’s entire life.

The first three months of your kid’s life may damn near kill you. That’s normal. The first year of his life may be the most challenging 365 days you face as a woman. But hear this — it gets better. Every day it gets better. One day, you’ll wake up in an overtired panic around 4am only to find that your baby actually hasn’t woken up yet, and you’ll rush to his royal cribside to find him soundly sleeping for the first time, and you’ll cry tears of joy and think to yourself that you never thought you’d get there but you did. And one day, you’ll get to the end of your day and realize that, for the first time, there wasn’t a single meltdown (from George or you) and you’ll think to yourself foolishly, “I could have another…”

So when (not IF, but WHEN) things get rough, know this — you’re made to do this. And even on days you don’t think you’re doing it, you are. Because just by being George’s mama, you’re doing it.

Oh you’re also a princess but whatever.

Last thing — is the hair/makeup team you had come to the hospital cheap? Just curious. I’d like to hire them for my next baby delivery.

Cheers, Kate and George! (Oh and William too, I GUESS.)

catherine, duchess of photoshoppington.

Okay. So my headline needs work. Whatever — deal with it.

Last weekend, Dan and I went over to our friend Ashley’s  house to hang out. Ashley’s a professional photographer (probably the best I’ve ever seen, by the way, and I don’t say that because she’s my friend — I say it because it’s true!) and we somehow got on the topic of outrageous Photoshop disasters. Then, Ashley pulled up Photoshop on her Macbook showed me just how easy it is to edit and morph images of people to make them look completely different. It blew my mind. I know Photoshop is powerful, but to see it in action is baffling.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the world at all, or have been following my blog for any length of time, you know that 99.9% of the images you see in magazines are Photoshopped. Maybe it’s desensitization to the issue, I don’t know, but I don’t get the urge to blog about each and every image I come across, pointing out all the obvious ways the image is distorted. I’ve just grown to accept that Photoshop isn’t going away and, if anything, it’s becoming more and more widely used. Sigh. I don’t like it, but it’s not like one little blog out there is going to change anything.

But every once in a while, a magazine will go way too far and piss me too far off to not talk about it. Grazia did that for me this week. Check out these magazine covers from Grazia, showing the same exact image of Kate Middleton.

Left: Australian Grazia. Right: British Grazia.

Image source: Jezebel

Grazia! What are you doing? That’s the SAME. EXACT. PHOTO. How did you think no one would notice?

Okay, so seeing these images initially made me angry for the same reason all Photoshopped images make me angry. Someone out there took a picture of another human being and decided she wasn’t thin enough so they just had to edit her waist down to an impossible size. And publish it for millions of people to see.

But then I stopped and thought, Holy crap, this is Princess Kate Middleton on her bloody wedding day. First of all, if I found out that my wedding photographer Photoshopped the pictures of my big day to indicate that I got married without a freaking ribcage, I would punch her. But, that glaring fact aside, do any of you reading this remember the headlines surrounding Kate before her wedding to Prince William?

And so many more.

So. Even after all the hoopla surrounding Kate being too skinny, Grazia evidently thought she still wasn’t skinny enough for the cover of their British magazine.

According to the lovely, smart, talented ladies at HelloGiggles, the folks at Grazia responded to the public’s outrage by saying they “reassure all our readers that we did not purposely make any alteration of the Duchess of Cambridge’s image to make her appear slimmer and we are sorry if this process gave that impression.

Yeah. Okay. That story holds about as much water as Kate Middleton’s non-existent stomach.