Cute bag

When my nephew, now 5, still needed a sippy of milk and a board book and a change of pants and a cup of Cheerios for any outing longer than a walk around the block, his mom once gazed wistfuly at whatever I was carrying then and said, "I wish I could have a cute bag." At the time I would have traded any bag of any cuteness instantly for what she had— a cute baby— but I did flash forward, briefly, to a life with lots of miscellaneous crap to haul around and no darling accessories and think, "Oh."

A mere three years on and the cute bag for moms is a growth industry with no apparent limit in sight. How many diaper bags that "look like a stylish purse" are currently available? Enough to support a site called DiaperBagZilla and a number of competitors, and they don't have everything. They don't for instance, have this.

When our own babies were new and we didn't know what we were doing I bought a pretty bag (still looked like a diaper bag, though) and Kenton bought a big butch camo backpack from the ninja store and both failed us and we ended up using a carry-on from some "mountain engineering"-type company which was meant for some serious manly purpose but is the right size and has lots of pockets. It spends most of its life attached to the stroller, since we're mostly pedestrians and the children are carted from place to place like wee pashas in a palanquin.

Recently, though, I needed a … purse (a word competing with "blouse" and "slacks" for my most-hated wardrobe term) and realized that none of the "cute bag!" bags I was looking at were up to taking on the jetsam tossed my way over the course of an ordinary afternoon. "Mo-o-m," my daughter will chant, tirelessly, aged 2 but sounding an impatient 14 as she waves her unwanted Snak-trap off the side of the stroller. No dainty darling handbag is going to handle all the jackets, Sigge bottles, toy trucks, and half-consumed fruit bars handed off to me, and stopping to zip everything into the stroller-mounted bag is a pain. The answer it was increasingly obvious, was a diaper bag. For me.

So this is what we've got, the sling tote from crunchy/yummy-mommy targeted boutique bag designers Fleurville, in a gorgeous botanical print laminated with something supposedly Earth-friendly, and a brilliant design bigger inside than out, like the Tardis. And it really does look like a cute purse.

Of course, I arrived at a new venue to do my twins workshop last week and the proprietor greeted me with "And look, you've got your diaper bag!"

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