It looks like Jessica Simpson‘s daughter Maxwell Drew is more than comfortable in the spotlight!
The 11-month-old lapped up the attention and put on a show for photographers as her mum launched Jessica’s Girl’s Collection her new children’s fashion line.
Joined by her sister Ashlee, pregnant style queen Jess smiled and was happy to be upstaged by her tiny tot who she introduced to the crowd following the launch.
We can’t wait to meet her next little one!
Maxwell Drew steals the show!
Jessica wears a maternity dress from her own line.
Jessica and her sister Ashlee watch Maxwell steal the show.
Jessica and her sister Ashlee both wear dresses from her clothing line.
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me “Aren’t you going to try for a boy?”, well … I may not be a rich woman, but I’d have had a fair few free lunches by now.
I’m the mother of two girls, and no, I am not going to ever try for a boy — but I may one day try for another healthy baby.
I don’t get the gender argument.
One of my friends also has two little girls and she and her husband are both desperate for a son. They plan to go on a special diet before they next try to conceive, in a hope they’ll sway the Y chromosome their way.
When said friend told me this (in earshot of her two delightful daughters) I just smiled and nodded, thinking to myself that she was freaking crazy.
Most of my friends with children have two of one gender. And most seem happy with what they’ve got: happy, strong, healthy, funny, curious, beautiful little children.
And yet, as anyone who does only have girls or boys: we get asked — all the time — if we’re happy with our lot.
Just last week, a friend of mine was asked if she’d try for another child (she has two boys). She said no, explaining two was her limit, she was done.
The other woman was a mother of three: two boys, and a girl. She exclaimed, “But it’s so worth it when you get a girl!” While my friend is good-natured enough not to get offended but seriously, what a seriously stupid and insensitive remark.
People who make comments like this need to realise they’re not only being rude, they’re diminishing the value of the children who already exist.
My friends are having babies left, right and centre these days. With pregnancies sometimes comes loss: I have many friends who have had multiple miscarriages and a few who have tragically delivered a stillborn baby.
These women long for a baby. They cry and ache for a baby. They beg the fertility gods, they inject themselves with drugs, and they lie still on a bed for months. All so they can have a baby.
One of my girlfriends spent thousands of dollars over eight long years before she finally had her babies. After all that time, she was blessed with twins. To her, two babies were more than she had ever hoped for.
Being desperate for one sex or the other also assumes that your boy or girl is going to fit into a gender stereotype neatly. It’s not that simple. Your son might love ballet, your daughter football.
I’m thrilled to have my two little girls. Just as thrilled as my friends who have two little boys. Or those friends who have one of each.
And no, I don’t want a baby boy. If I’m crazy enough try for a third baby, its sex will be irrelevant.
Your say: Are you pregnant? Do you care what sex your child is? Does your partner?
Model Andrej Pejic and his mother Jadranka. Photography by Liz Ham, styling by Mattie Cronan.
Blurring the boundaries between men and women has brought Andrej Pejic international celebrity as a model, writes Caroline Overington, who talks to the 21-year-old and his mother about his career and family life.
ASK any mother what they want for their children, they’ll probably say they want them to be happy. Drill down a little, and here is what they mean:
They’d like their children not be bullied at school. They’d like them to have friends. Also, ultimately, if their children fall in love, they hope that it will be with somebody who will love them right back for being exactly as they are.
It’s probably fair to say that Melbourne mum, Jadranka Pejic, worried a little more than might be normal about her son, the now-21-year-old Andrej.
“Of course I could see that he was different,” she tells the Weekly. “I was thinking, what kind of life will he have? Will the world accept him?”
Short answer?
Yes, it would accept him. In certain circles, Andrej Pejic is now the man most-wanted, a model who has strutted catwalks in London, Paris and New York, posed for French Vogue, and appeared on towering billboards in Times Square, all of which means that he’s near the pinnacle of his profession, an amazing achievement, more so when you understand that he has done all this — strutted and pouted and posed – dressed not as a man but as a fine-boned woman.
It’s an extraordinary story , not just because Andrej is so unusual — indeed, beautiful — to look at, nor because he’s making it as a man in a woman’s world.
The background is fascinating, too: Andrej came to Australia with his mother when he was just eight, speaking not a word of English. They were fleeing the war in Bosnia. Jadranka was university educated, but took a series of low-paid, cleaning jobs to put Andrej and his brother, Igor, through school, while trying to find her own feet in Melbourne.
From the earliest age, she could see that Andrej was different from other boys.
“He wanted to play with Barbie dolls and Barbie cars,” Jadranka tells the Weekly. “I would try to hide these things from people but because it was my son and it made him happy I would slip his Barbie doll to him under the table and say, here, go and play with it, and bring it back to me when you are finished.”
He wanted to grow his hair and wear girl’s clothes. She wondered whether she could, or even should try to change him. She was terrified that he’d be bullied. Then he gained entry to University High, a school with students from 55 different nations, who present in all kinds of ways (it’s got goths, and Geeks, and kids with Mohawks.)
The school’s motto is “individuality, diversity and excellence” – all of which Andrej had in spades.
“It was a sophisticated, liberal school,” Andrej says. “They encouraged me to just be me.”
Andrej was academically brilliant, cruising through his classes, and he proved popular at University High, where his long hair and make-up was just part of who he was.
Friends told him he was pretty enough to be a model but he was also keen on university. Then one night, he was working late, trying to earn a bit of extra money, when he was discovered by a modelling agency while working the counter at McDonald’s in Melbourne’s Swanston Street.
It was New Year’s Eve, and his life was about to change forever.
Read more of this story in the April issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Tracy Grimshaw. Photography by Michelle Holden, styling by Nell Simpson and Mattie Cronan.
Tracy Grimshaw put her life on hold to nurse her dying mum. Eighteen months on, she tells Michael Sheather her grief is so intense, she is considering therapy.
Tracy Grimshaw’s life changed irrevocably the day her mother Barbara died. Tracy, the host of television’s A Current Affair, stood by Barbara throughout a gruelling nine-month battle with lung cancer.
Yet nine months was nowhere near enough time to prepare Tracy for the overwhelming loss and grief that swept over her when the end finally came and that still reverberate today.
“I somehow expected that, after 18 months, it would get easier,” says Tracy, 52.
“It doesn’t get easier at all. I miss her. I still want to pick up the phone and hear her voice. I haven’t stopped wishing she was still here or that I could reach out and touch her.
Barbara Grimshaw was 76 when she died, a feisty, down-to-earth, intelligent woman, attributes she shared with her daughter. But she did have one vice. Like many who grew up in the post-war era, Barbara was a smoker. She gave up when she was 50, it came back to haunt her.
The diagnosis was cancer. Fortunately, Tracy was on her summer break when her mother got sick. She was able to be with her mother every day as she began the gruelling rounds of chemotherapy and recovery that lasted for the next three months. Barbara moved in with Tracy, who eventually did a course in palliative home care, learning to administer the morphine and other drugs her mother needed to keep her pain-free and comfortable.
When Barbara died in Tracy’s home on September 7, 2011, one day short of the nine months that doctors predicted she might survive after diagnosis, Tracy was there and so was her brother.
Tracy says she is grateful for the time she managed to have with her mother before her death, but she is still trying to cope with the fact that “there is a lot that I wish I had been able to say”.
“The truth is, you can never say enough. When you lose someone who you love so much you regret all the things you didn’t say for the rest of your life.
“I still think that perhaps I didn’t tell her often enough that I loved her. Maybe I didn’t tell her how much I truly admired her. But a part of me also knows that she knew those things.”
Tracy says losing her mother has made her more vulnerable and more compassionate. A strong woman, like her mother, it’s also made her realise that those vulnerabilities are ok.
“I think society expects people to be pragmatic when, as an adult, you lose a parent,” she says.
“But I don’t think you can be. At least, I can’t be. If parents lose their children, then that is an acknowledged tragedy because it is not part of the cycle of life and rightly so.
“I think people should be okay to be decimated by something like this. It doesn’t mean you’re weak.”
Read more of this story in the April issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Leila McKinnon and baby Ted. Photography by Alana Landsberry, styling by Lizzy Shepherd.
After nine years of hoping and dreaming for a child, and five years of IVF, TV journalist Leila McKinnon and her husband, Nine Network supremo David Gyngell, now have a beautiful red-haired baby boy to call their own, writes Michael Sheather.
Leila McKinnon hadn’t considered the possibility of children before she met David, but by the time they married in — in 2004, they both knew that was what they wanted to do.
“Even so, we weren’t in any great hurry,” she tells The Weekly.
It wasn’t until five years later, in 2009, when Leila was 35, that the couple accepted that their dreams of becoming parents might not be as easily realised as they imagined.
They consulted a specialist and received the difficult news that they could not conceive naturally, but may be able to conceive with the help of IVF, but they had no idea how difficult their road would become.
“There were a couple of times when we thought that we had come to the end of the road and we might have to look at other options,” recalls Leila.
“But somehow, we always managed to see through to find another way, a little more hope. We didn’t seriously discuss donors or surrogacy or adoption because we were always saying, ‘Let’s just see what happens after this’.”
After yet another round of IVF in 2011, instead of the usual disappointment, Leila and David go the news they had hoped for. She was pregnant.
“We thought that was it,” says Leila. “We told our families and our closest friends, and we were very excited. We thought we had finally done it.”
Yet, at 11 weeks After conception, after a routine examination by their obstetrician, they were told that the baby was dead. “It was like falling off a cliff,” says Leila. But a few months after that she began another round. This time, she thought, maybe this time.
Edmund “Ted” McKinnon Gyngell was delivered on October 16, 2012 at 1:48am weight 3.018 kilograms.
Born to an undisputed power couple of parents, his birth, an emotional experience with any baby, came complete with an extra dose of drama spiced with high finance.
As Leila and husband Nine Network boss David Gyngell were about to become parents, the dad-to-be was still deeply enmeshed in one of the most important negotiations of his life, the deal to stop Nine becoming a financial wreck under the weight of crippling debt.
“David was sitting on the sofa in the corner of the birthing suite,” says Leila, 40. “There was a lot of swearing, lots of yelling and lots of talk about billions of dollars floating through the air. At one point, I think I heard him say, ‘Well, if they’re not happy, tell them to go and get f**ked’. It was just a little surreal, but at the same time, very funny for both me and the nurses.”
By 2am they had got through the deal and the birth.
“David is such a natural father. He has all these plans to kick a footy with him and take him to the beach,” Leila says.
“He is always saying things to me like, ‘Thank you for making such a beautiful child.’ He swears black and blue that he knew it would be a boy all along.”
“I know I’m not the only person to have a baby and that other couples have problems. I think everyone has a challenge to face when they are having a baby. I was fortunate to have a good birth and to have Ted come perfect healthy,” she says.
“So, the way I look at it, I had my battles early. I am so over the moon.”
Read more of this story in the April issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Solo mum Fifi Box has been so excited about the imminent arrival of her baby that she’s forgotten to get ready for the life-changing event.
“I’ve had no preparation for this whatsoever,’’ says Fifi. “I’m doing pregnancy the way I did my Year 12 exams – I’m just sort of rocking up.” In keeping with her signature off-the-cuff style, 36-year-old Fifi admitted last week to her radio stablemates Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O that not even the nursery is ready.
“I wanted to be one of those mums who was really prepared and it was a really nice environment for the baby,” she says. “But essentially, it’s just white walls and a bassinet. I’ve gone through 7-8 months of excitement, but the last few weeks it’s dawned on me that… my life is never going to be the same.’’
Now, with just four weeks to go until her bundle of joy arrives, Fifi’s realising she may have left it all too late as her ever-growing belly is getting in the way of even the simplest tasks. “Some people just love it [pregnancy], but it’s difficult,” she says. “It’s hard to breathe, it’s hard to walk, and it’s hard to shop. I’m just going to let the baby come here and then it can sort of tell me what it wants.”
While Fifi’s reported baby daddy, former Ironman Grant Kenny, may not be in the picture, her radio co-host and close friend Jules Lund is on hand for any parenting advice – and the first-time mum needs it! “One tip someone gave me was every time you go to a supermarket, buy nappies. So I’ve been buying nappies for six months,” Fifi laughs. “But Jules came over the other day and he goes, ‘You do know you’ve got 18 months’ worth of newborn nappies – they’re ‘newborn’ for six weeks!’”
Read more about Fifi’s pregnancy countdown in this Woman’s Day on sale Monday March 25, 2013.
The pop princess laughs off claims she’s taken her weight-loss too far.
Last week, pictures of Ricki-Lee Coulter looking drawn and super skinny sparked a social-media frenzy. “You are losing too much weight, not looking like the old Ricki we all fell in love with,” wrote one fan.
But Ricki-Lee, 27, has hit back. “I wasn’t always 30kg heavier – that is what people forget,” she tells The Sun-Herald. “I put that weight on after my divorce. I ate to comfort myself.”
The singer’s willowy frame has fans labelling her “scary skinny” but she insists she falls within a healthy weight range for her 173cm height. “I have always been a curvy girl… and I’ve never let the stereotype of what a pop star should be ever control me,” she says. “The decision to get fit and lose weight was not to fit that stereotype.”
Ricki-Lee’s figure has made headlines for years. As recently as 2010 she was a poster-girl for curvy women, even fronting a campaign for a shapewear label. “I’m not ashamed of showing my curves to the world,” she told Woman’s Day in January 2010. But soon she’d dropped three dress sizes, and since falling in love with personal trainer Richard Harrison, 32, Ricki-Lee has cut out “heavy food” and embraced exercise.
Read more about Ricki-Lee’s weight loss in this Woman’s Day on sale Monday March 25, 2013.
As he gets set for his biggest challenge, the chef opens up about his best mate.
Trekking through rugged jungle, TV’s sexiest chef Manu Feildel is facing the biggest fight of his life. As he battles the tough conditions, the plight of cancer-stricken children will spur him on. But at the forefront of his mind will be one special boy – his son Jonti.
The 40-year-old My Kitchen Rules judge this week embarks on an incredible journey, tackling the Kokoda Trail to raise money for CanTeen – a charity that supports young people living with cancer. The extreme expedition will be challenging both physically and mentally, but for single dad Manu, being apart from eight-year-old Jonti will be more painful.
As one of TV’s most-wanted personalities, he’s used to enforced separation when work takes him away from home – but he admits it doesn’t get any easier. “When I collected my son from the airport from an overseas trip, [I cried],” Manu, 40 this week, tells Fairfax press. “I hadn’t realised how much I missed him!”
Despite his huge success, Manu remains focused on what really matters. “The number-one thing I love is definitely my son. Being a dad is amazing. It’s hard to put in words. What I feel about Jonti, I can’t describe,” he says. “My partner says he’s a mini Manu – he’s a bit of a clown. He’s loving, genuine and funny. When he wakes up in the morning, he always has a smile.”
Read more about Manu’s relationship with his son in this week’s Woman’s Day on sale Monday March 25, 2013.
This Queensland father of three pays a heart-breaking price for turning his back on the controversial cult.
Adrian Kelsey lay slumped on the couch, feeling as if his heart had just been ripped out. Instead of the animated phone call he’d expected from his Mexico-based children Estefania, 13, and Rafael, 10, about their proposed visit to see him on the Gold Coast, he’d just learned from his crying daughter he was banished from their lives.
In a heated conversation with his ex-wife Fransyl, the former devoted Scientologist was told he was “disconnected”, a punishment for speaking out against the church. Adrian says that in cult parlance, this means he is officially labelled as a “suppressive person”, and no Scientologists – his children included – are allowed contact with him.
He says hearing his once defiant daughter Estefania renege on her earlier promise to love him “no matter what”, left him shattered and shaken. “My heart was lying on the floor,” says Adrian, his voice breaking at the recollection. “It’s the most difficult thing I’ve had to deal with in my life. You have to wonder what happened. What did Scientology tell her to make her change her mind? The manipulation and lies must be off the scale.”
Adrian, a former staff member at the church’s Florida headquarters, is now revealing his own experiences with Scientology. Little by little his belief in the religion was eroded by his research. The final straw was the way his parents were treated by the church. Although both were long-time Scientology “employees” in Sydney, Adrian says his father was gradually demoted to a $50-a-week gardener post as his Alzheimer’s worsened. When his dad needed skin cancer treatment, Adrian says Scientology refused to help.
Read more about Adrian’s clash with Scientology in this week’s Woman’s Day on sale Monday March 25, 2013.
She was a girl guide in her adolescent years, but the Duchess of Cambridge seemed to have forgotten the organisation’s motto – be prepared – yesterday, forgetting her gloves on a freezing visit to a scout camp.
Kate, 31, braved snow and chilly conditions to meet scouts at an outdoor camp in Cumbria. While almost everyone else wore warm gloves to protect their hands, the royal hands were bare, despite the artic temperatures.
Pregnant Kate looked lovely at the event, donning her favourite Le Chameau wellingtons, a khaki jacket, a tweed cap and a scout neckerchief.
Kate struggled to keep her hands warm as temperatures plummeted.
The pregnant Duchess was glowing despite the chilly weather.
The Duchess looked effortlessly stylish at the scout camp.
Her baby bump was hidden under a green jacket.
Kate spent lots of time chatting to kids despite the snowy conditions.
She even got her hands dirty, making bread with the scouts.
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