Brad and Angelina: family fun for everyone

Jon Bonné Lifestyle Editor • Profile

Tinseltown baby confirmations are a drawn-out affair nowadays. Fortunately we didn't have to wait long to get the official word that Angelina Jolie is with child.

Confirmations aside, there was a mountain of rumor and increasingly solid evidence in the past couple weeks. That mountain grew like a lava dome on Mount St. Helens, from Us Weekly's "Is She Hiding a Bump?" photo montage to the usual furtive online snaps, from a non-denial denial by Brad Pitt's publicist to a straightforward "and how" take from the News of the World.

"It's early days yet so they're not announcing it publicly, but anybody can see how thrilled the pair of them are," the British tab quoted a friend as saying.

No one ever doubted that Pitt would be the lucky father. And now that Jolie is indeed hatching a baby Brangelina, it's also fair to assume that despite her prior adoptive approach, she wouldn't stand for any Michael Jackson-like baster antics — a scenario contemplated for at least one other high-visibility power couple. You can't imagine a woman who has so often bragged about the notches on her bedpost would have it any other way.

Yet Angelina has always separated love from sex, and sex from her responsibilities as a mother. What she did with Mommy's Personal Time was her own business, but in a rare display of Hollywood candor, she made clear that her dalliances would never interfere with her love and care for adopted son Maddox.

Then came Brad.

The exact source of magnetism between the two — besides their mutually stunning looks and even more stunning success — remains a mystery, but they've fit seamlessly into each other's lives. There's that mutual save-the-world drive, with Brad tagging along on Angelina's mercy missions. There's him adopting her yen for flying small (if rather expensive) airplanes. The next logical step is matching his-and-hers Harleys, which would make a nice wedding gift.

Slideshow   Angelina Jolie See highlights from Jolie's life and career. more photos

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Even if you've got your moralistic groove on about Angelina's single-mom ways — even if you've thought she's bucking for Trollop of the Year — it's been hard to question her love for her children and her ability to create a family that, given the standards of her contemporaries, is pretty darn normal. All the toy-shopping and globehopping is a long, long way from any Joan Crawford coat-hanger moments.

For his part, Pitt always talked about wanting kids when he was married to Jen — indeed, that became a rumored reason for the fall-of-Troy end of that romance — so the one thing that ultimately made perfect sense was when he sought adoptive custody of Maddox, now 4, and baby Zahara. It didn't matter whether the details of Brad's fatherly ways were wholly genuine, or slightly touched up to help rehab his Cad Brad image after parting ways with La Aniston.  The notion of Dad Brad is too appealing to tarnish, even if it broke a few throbbing hearts and Eva Longoria had to send her "I'll Have Your Baby, Brad" T-shirt to the thrift shop.

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