We went to a wedding last night, and because the venue was 100m from our apartment here in Beijing, and lovely nanny Malou agreed to come fetch her once things got too nutty, Bella was able to attend for the first couple of hours. A lot of people absolutely raved about her outfit, but I wasn't prepared and would end up just stammering something along the lines of "Uh... thanks, uh... my mom got her the dress this spring and we thought, uh... that it would never fit. Uh. Where's that waiter with my champagne?"
People must've thought I was daft or just painfully, horribly, socially inept, but the truth was, I couldn't bring myself to say anything else that came to mind about Bella's clothes: that the dress is hand-embroidered with silk ribbon all over the bodice; that I bought the hand-knit angora cardigan last winter from a precious little kid's clothing store in Paris; or that the edgy fake-fur vest was from a shop in Knightsbridge around the corner from my uncle's house in London.
Because no matter how cosmopolitan Beijing gets, or how my in-laws like to say that for the kids these days (meaning me and Mik), "hopping on a plane is like riding the bus," you really can't go around saying stuff like that to people about the provenance of your two-year-old's clothes.
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