So round is our baby

Our son is fat.

When we said a while back that Sonny was ugly, we added a careful proviso: We felt this way about only one facet of him.

But there's no limiting the truth here: He's gone round, all-round. Slim enough when he entered the world eight weeks ago, he's been filling up like a bicycle tyre ever since, or should we say like the Michelin Man.

There are clashing opinions in our home regarding this, one that may reflect a worldwide divide in baby debates. Mum is from the school that thinks babies look cutest when there is - how does one put it - a certain sculpting of fat in the right places. Cheeks substantial enough to be pinched, limbs generous enough to be playfully pulled at: It's all part of the ideal presentation for proper parental baby-basking. Sonny's uncle is of a similar opinion, and has been known to claim that only fat babies are cute.

Pa, for his part, isn't proclaiming that there is some health issue regarding chubbiness (there shouldn't be). In fact, when a baby is peacefully asleep, a certain roly-polyness may even enhance overall adorability. But a fat trap looms for the unwary, warns Pa: Beefier babies, when crying lustily, look especially petulant and ill-disciplined. When being fed, there is a danger of their appearing greedy where a more modestly-proportioned infant would seem merely hungry.

Such matters of baby aesthetics may seem fit topics only for inane repartee. But they reproduce in wee dimensions the equally meaningless debates that rage over which sorts of 'body shapes' are most comely, and 'how fat is too fat' when it comes to lingerie models - or even 'true beauty'. It is only at the extremes that we will find people starving or purging themselves to fit prevailing stereotypes. You won't catch either of us controlling Sonny's milk intake in order to have him at optimal plumpness, whatever that may mean. But whenever we bandy about notions of attractiveness - and there's no age restriction on what we're talking about here - we take ourselves too seriously only at our peril.