'Support panty thin' isn't thin...

Hi Milla.

It's Mom.

Sunday morning. 9am. You're asleep in Dad's arms, on the couch. He's asleep in yours. It's a delicious thing to watch, but more than that it means an hour or so of free time for me. I've had a strong coffee and run a bubble bath. And guess what I'm doing?

Yup, blogging.

Why the fek is this girl wearing Spanx?

Sitting on the edge of the bed - bath going cold in the other room - and blogging. Because something interesting occurred to me this morning, while I was browsing on The Fancy (my favorite iPhone app and the most fascinating thing ever, for the moment):

The kind of thin you look when you wear granny broeke a la Bridget Jones is not real thin.

I have become (or, if I'm being honest, I've been for a while) the kind of person who looks okay in most clothes but requires the heavy-duty assistance of Woolworths Spanx to look truly streamlined. And that's not okay with me. It's not good enough.

You see, The Fancy is characterised by many, many haut couture photos of, among other things, women is exquisite clothing. And while I'm usually not altogether wowed by fashion in general and expensive, floaty, skinny-person fashion in particular, I've realised that the open back look is quite lovely.

Like this.

But you can't enlist the help of granny panties for your back.

So, the time has come to stop farting about, to re-read my '10 breaths, 10 kilometres, size 10' post, to start eating 3-5 meals a day like a normal person, and to lose those last 3.5 blasted kilos (tho' by now it's probably a nice, round 4kg) sometime before you're old enough to grab my belly fat, shake it and sing 'The Wheels on the Bus'.

Your birthday is in three weeks.

Yes, in three short weeks' time you'll be one year old. Kan jy dit glo?

Aside from the amazingness of that, and aside from the fact that you've been in our lives for a whole year now, making us happy and proud and being funny and cute and clever and generally wonderful, in three weeks you'll be a toddler. Not a baby.

And I'll be a mom. Not a new mom. Just... a mom. A normal mom.

And as I've said many, many times to anyone who'll listen, any baby fat I still have by then isn't baby fat. It's just fat.

However, since there's no way in hell I'm going to have lost those 3.5 (okay, 4) dratted kilos in three weeks, I'm going to focus instead on eating more often, eating more slowly, exercising with purpose - not just because it's in my diary - and not snacking on your leftovers.

Onse Charlize. Circa 1980-something.

I swore I'd never be that mom. Too late, she cried.

And just in case you're starting to wonder how vacuous I really am, you can stop wondering, beautiful child of mine. I am vacuous. Some of the time. I believe it's healthy. A measure of vanity, vapidity and vacuity is perfectly acceptable in a person, provided that they're also sufficiently intelligent to accurately define all three.

May you be mostly a rocket scientist, but sometimes a vain one.

I love you.

Mom x