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Nicole Richie is featured on the cover of the new issue of Harper's Bazaar magazine and she and her family (papa Lionel Richie, babydaddy Joel Madden and her beautiful 4-month old daughter Harlow Winter) are featured in a cute domestic-themed photospread that accompanies her coverstory. Here are a few pics from Nicole's photospread:


And here is a short, behind-the-scenes, video of her covershoot:



And a portion of her coverstory:

On the rear deck of Nicole Richie and boyfriend Joel Madden's house in Glendale, a Los Angeles suburb so un-Hollywood that it's almost Cleaver-esque, hangs a huge webbed curtain that brings to mind army training maneuvers. Nicole and Joel hung the netting when Nicole was nine months pregnant, to foil the helicopters constantly flying overhead. How Sean Penn and Madonna. "Didn't [Penn] write in rocks, like, 'Fuck you' or something?" asks Nicole admiringly, showcasing her handiwork, which, as new daughter Harlow turns two months old, is only now being taken down ... Nicole retreats to the deck, munching on watermelon from a Tupperware container. What surprises her most about motherhood? "Hmm, I would say how fun it is," she says, surely sending other new mothers into spasms of resentment. "Everybody talks about how difficult it is in the first three months, but I absolutely love it." Close friend Mary-Kate Olsen says, "Nicole is one of the most loving and nurturing mothers I have yet to come across." But father Lionel Richie knows best: "Motherhood has given her all the keys to understanding how her mother and I were trying to raise her," he says. "Now it has come full circle." ... Nicole emphasizes that her beau is "very conservative." Secret Hollywood Republican conservative? "Oh, no, not that," she says with her tinkly laugh. She considers Joel's family a model for her own. "I want five children," she says deliberately, "twin boys and three girls. I've wanted that since I was a little girl." Nicole describes Joel, the family's chief diaper changer, as having "a different way of thinking. But at the same time, he's never tried to change me. And if anything, we were friends first. We just have fun together. When we're apart," which occurs often, she notes, when your bloke's in a band, "we just get on iChat and don't even say anything to each other." She starts to giggle. "He likes to get girly sometimes. But he'd kill me if he knew I said that!" Joel met the parents - Lionel and his first wife, Brenda - almost immediately. "I brought him over to my dad's house," Nicole explains. "They're both musicians, they're both from the South, and they're both very conservative, so they got along right away." What about a Lionel-Joel duet then? "Sure, why not? My dad really respects Joel as an artist, and they're both really great songwriters, so you never know." ... Joel had remarked at the previous day's shoot for Bazaar (at Lionel's Beverly Hills home) that he was wary of bringing up a child in Los Angeles because he felt it was harder for her to not become jaded. He's fantasized about buying an escape hatch in Thailand (where the couple have traveled often) or Sydney - somewhere, in short, where one doesn't have to hang paparazzi-deflecting nets in the backyard. "I personally love Los Angeles," Nicole counters. "You can say anything you want about L.A., but kids get into things." The young family will be spending more time in New York, though, since they bought an apartment downtown. "I know that I grew up on the faster side," Nicole notes, "but I don't think that a town matters if you know who you are." On marriage, she says, "One day, yeah - not tomorrow, not today. We are committed to our family. I'm 26. I've definitely had a very eventful year. So right now, it's about me enjoying my time with my daughter." What will she try to steer Harlow away from as she gets older? "To be honest," Nicole replies, "it would completely break my heart if she got a tattoo." She laughs out loud, more than aware of the irony ... Nicole appeared on the cover of People magazine with Harlow a couple weeks after Harlow's birth. "The day before it came out, I was nervous," she says, "because there was going to be a picture of my daughter everywhere." Then she evinces a peculiarly Hollywood logic. "But if I didn't put a picture out, it would have been 10 times worse. I wanted to stop people trying to get pictures of her. I was just being a protective mom." As Lionel characterizes the public's interest in Nicole, "It's because she is real. She is always brutally honest. What she says is what she means. Everywhere I go, they love Nicole. She would be a hit anywhere. I love her so much, and that's not speaking as her father, that's speaking as a fan." So Nicole is growing her fan base. She is writing a follow-up to her novel, The Truth About Diamonds, and taking meetings about turning the original book into a Gossip Girl-type series. As for Chicago, not right now."Doing musical theater really does take up your entire life," she notes. "But I'm really excited to get out there and show people that I'm capable of doing something other than The Simple Life." ... "You know, I went through a stage of thinking that once you had a baby, you moved to Brentwood, had a white picket fence, and it changed your entire life," Nicole says. "But I love where I am right now. Every single thing is for Harlow. Joel took me out last week, and he was like, 'Why don't we go out and have a shopping day?' But I ended up only going to kid stores." She laughs wryly. "I didn't get to buy shoes or anything." Finishing her watermelon and preparing to tend to Harlow, who is fussing upstairs, Nicole seems calm, as if she had the keys to the universe. "I don't necessarily think I'm more conservative," she says, "but everyone around me has told me I am." Can she guess at who among her friends will next enter mommyhood - Paris, perhaps? "Ha, nooo" is her reply. "But I don't think anyone would have bet on me."

Not true, I bet on her ... I knew that she would be an amazing mother and am happy to see that the bet paid off. The whole Harper's coverpiece is a really interesting read. You can still tell that Nicole Richie is still Nicole Richie -- motherhood hasn't changed her, it has enhanced her and allowed to be the woman that she's always had inside her. The crazy partygirl hanging off Paris Hilton's arm never felt like the real Nicole to me. The woman who carries her beautiful daughter Harlow in her arms while she is on the arm of Joel is the woman she was always meant to be ... that was my bet all along. [Source]

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