Babies babies babies. They are bloody EVERYWHERE. they seem to be the latest Must-Have accessory, especially in the celebrity world with women from the D-List to the A-List popping out the little cuties. I can't remember when I was growing up, there being this much fanfare attached to a celebrity sproglet arriving. We only really took any notice of the Geldof's because back in the 80s NO ONE called their children ridiculous things. Thanks Bob and Paula for setting that particular trend.
But now, celeb offspring are commonplace, they are as 'papped' as their fabulous parents, and I am definitely guilty of being as nosy as the next person to see how celeb offspring are raised (no flight is complete without a plethora of gossip rags and a bloody mary).
However, gone are the days when I look through these magazines just for clothing trends, how celebs are dressed to impress and fashion faux pas. What has happened to me? I now regularly find myself checking out how new mums hide their new body shapes and my new mummy porn: fabulous, trendy and elaborate posh push-chairs!
So, this new fascination got me thinking about how much things have changed with regards to baby things:
The clothes, the accessories but mainly the transportation. When I was a baby (the heady days of the early 70s) all prams were pretty much the same, and when we out grew our prams, we were generally moved into one of those stripy pushchairs that looked like a deck chair on wheels and only came in red or blue. But now, the premium pushchair is where it's at and as an expectant parent, there are literally HUNDREDS to choose from.
Of course the KING of the premium pushchair, is the Bugaboo. In fact, in my opinion it was Bugaboo that changed the face of baby transportation: the first one appeared in an episode of Sex and the City back in 2002 when Miranda had baby Brady. That appearance, followed by Gwyneth Paltrow choosing it as her pram of choice for baby Apple cemented its position at the top of the tree of celebrity baby transporters. And with good reason. It's a fantastic feat of engineering that is still more or less unparalleled in the world of baby travel systems. But other brands are nipping at its fabulously designed heels, with Victoria Beckham opting for an Icandy for baby Harper, and every baby brand from Mothercare to Mamas and Papas putting out its own Bugaboo homage.
Of course, Dutch design that good doesn't come cheap: the Bugaboo is the Aston Martin of the pushchair world (hence the celebrity devotion), and out of the financial range of most normal, hardworking folk. (Though you can get them second hand on eBay slightly cheaper).
So why has the premium pushchair had such a meteoric rise to fame? When was the sea change? Yet again, in my humble opinion, it was probably back in the early noughties when the cult of celebrity took a TIGHT hold. Prior to that time, we would cast a collective eye over the gossip pages of a tabloid newspaper, but there were no magazines dedicated as a whole to the cult of celebrity. Then Heat magazine arrived and we all decided (well, some of us) that it was IMPERATIVE that we knew what our favourite celebrities ate, wore and wheeled their babies around in. A new era had dawned and this obsession with celebrity and the refined world in which they live shows no signs of abating.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to decide which particular posh-pushchair I will be wheeling my next baby, Dandelion Delilah, around in.