The first time I saw a size zero pavadai was when my parents landed in the US armed with 4 pairs when they came to help us with child#1. I was fascinated. I held the pavadai and wondered how small the baby would be if she had to fit in to these doll sized clothes. I took an immediate liking to the green pavadai with red borders and put it aside to use for child#1’s punyakavachanam function.

On the day of the function we dressed her up in the green pavadai and she was swimming in it! We discovered that size 0 is more of a 3 month size and we did quite a bit of tucking, rolling and pinning to make it kind of an okay fit.

For child#2, my mother got a pavadai custom made in orange and cream color. She had the tucks and other alterations already made in order to make the fit better. But there is a Murphy and needless to say he intervened.

Child#2 was always a small child, a good 2 weeks behind the projected growth chart. Me starting out with a negative weight of 92 pounds and staying at the same weight well in to my second trimester didn’t help the matter. At a point the doctor was alarmed and asked me to put on weight rapidly. I battled on bravely but couldn’t get beyond 105. My doctor scheduled another ultrasound and insisted that I put on a 10-15 more pounds as the baby, though healthy is small. To make the matters worse, child#2 came two weeks early! So even the supposedly small size of pavadai was way too big for her. The shirt came to her knees, skirt flowed well beyond her legs and she looked like a Rajasthani kathputli puppet! A red wrinkly puppet that made us dance to her tunes.

All these memories came flooding back today as I got a doll sized pavadai-sattai made for R’s newphew’s new born.A pavadai made entirely out of a blouse bit that was bit small to stitch a blouse in the design I had in mind and a left over blue silk I had. We are all dying of cutness overload!! Sharing the pictures and memories here.