same, same, but different

A few weeks ago I attended a close friends baby shower. We're expecting an sms anytime now telling us that a beautiful baby girl has finally arrived and another playmate for baby TJ. I am at the stage where baby showers are the norm. Just a couple of years ago eggs and I were attending weddings, weddings and weddings. Now it's baby showers.

The funniest thing about baby showers is even though I feel older having kids of my own, I always leave a baby shower feeling like I have just attended a friends 10th birthday party. The only difference is that we talk about labour pains rather than 'Young Talent Time' (back in my days) or 'bratz'. Our husbands drop us off and pick us up instead of our parents. Also, we now eat rice paper rolls and sushi instead of fairy bread and honey joys but there is still the cupcakes, games, presents and the goodie bag that I get to take home (no longer mix lollies but have been replaced by tea bags).

Eggs finds it extremely funny that we play games such as 'guess the celeb' or 'baby trivia'. I even won a prize for answering the most correct questions about how well I know the mother. I love prizes. I love games and being competitive I love to win.

Ofcourse I love attending baby showers. Any chance to hang out with my girlfriends without the men is great, but next time I'm at a baby shower, I am going to know all the names of celebrities siblings and the most popular selling baby items.

Here are some photos of the quilt that I made for the new baby girl that will be arriving soon. The binding was a pain.












The quilt was made with material that was brought while in Japan.

















Ciao,
bananas

If you're old and you know it, clap your hands

When I was young I never understood why my Dad would write letters to The Age newspaper to express his opinions. Why bother? What difference does it make? While I am still too lazy to write an actual letter, I have in recent times found myself writing complaint emails when I get bad service. And just recently even Bananas has also joined the crusade which got me to thinking how much we've changed since the little man arrived.

The incident mentioned above relates to trying to order e-tags for Eastlink from their website. This was probably one of the most painful experiences I have endured online. Trying to go back to change details (when you realise that having two accounts using the same email address as a login is fraught with danger but exists as an option on the website) kills the whole process. The alternative choice of login is an allocated account number (which appears as a mandatory field even though it isn't allocated until after you've registered). Use not the "validate address" function for it makes things go pear shaped pretty quickly. In all cases you must being again I could go on (and anyone who knows me will realise the truth of that statement) but at the end of the day it was pretty clear that they had either hired the world's most unbelievably incompetent Business Analyst to design the website or they simply didn't care. I chose to believe the latter as I think that laziness is a more forgivable sin than stupidity. Subsequently I decided that if they didn't care, it wasn't worth me wasting my time on an email (that, and given the quantity of expletives I was likely to employ I'm quite sure my complaint email would go straight into the trash anyway). This is when Bananas took up the challenge - "I'm a BA - I would want to know if it were me". Thus brought about Bananas' first complaint "letter".

So what is it about being old (it's a relative term but we both still have fond memories of being 21 and thinking thirty-somethings were ancient) and Australian that compels us to write letters/emails? I have seen the term "kidult" bandied about a bit recently and I've always thought it applied fairly accurately to us. I still play computer games and avoid wearing anything that needs ironing while Bananas has the self control of an eight year old. On the other hand we are starting to care a whole lot more about where the world is heading because we have genetic material that needs to exist here. So we are going to make the world a better place a little at a time, starting with badly cobbled together websites. So if you're a monopoly company with a moron-designed website we are forced to use - watch out, because if it isn't up to scratch we're going to write a letter!!!

My toy sale is bigger than yours

What defines the biggest toy sale? I noticed in Eastland today that both Big W and K-mart are having the biggest ever toy sale. Obviously they can't both be the biggest. What's up with that?

It's interesting that there's a lot of cross-branding going on with toys since I've been "back in the market". Star wars lego is all over the place. I like the way that lego has even made it's way into console games with lego Indiana Jones starring in one recent console title. One of the most out-there ones was star wars transformers. Combine Hans Solo robot and Chewbacca robot into the Millenium Falcon!!! Who comes up with these ideas?!?!? No seriously, who does? And do they want to give me a job?

I reckon we can settle the whole geek debate on Ninjas vs Pirates once and for all. Why should we have to choose ninjas or pirates when you can have.... ninja pirates!!! They can stealthily sail up to cargo ships at night, board the ship, silently kill the captain with shurikens and steal all the booty without being seen or heard by the rest of the crew. And they can have ninja wenches that clean their ninja suits for them, oil their ninja swords and and fetch them rum.

One for the yuppies amongst us - a toy Krupps espresso machine. How cool is that? Besides, it also has practical applications. It'd be good to make a barista out of the boy so that someone else can drive the coffee machine.



















This is why Dads want boys. I get to play with toys all over again and it's all legit. Well mostly... I haven't quite got the case for a PS3 past bananas yet. "Really dear, it's not for me. TJ will grow into it".