The Baby Store AKA Hades

I hate shopping. If I were to rank the worst places on Earth, it would look something like this.

1. Kabul, Afghanistan.
2. Mogadishu, Somalia
3. Chadstone Shopping Centre
4. Baghdad, Iraq

The seventh ring of hell in the shopping world is ‘the baby store’. Here you will often find determined looking women leading around soulless and dejected looking dudes, who are giving each other subtle but knowing glances as they pass each other in the aisles. I feel you bro. It isn’t because we’re not excited about having a baby, we just can’t stand shopping, and standing in front of a bunch of baby shit disposal units deciding on whether we splash out on the one that twists the turds in a knot over the one that makes one giant shit sausage isn’t our idea of an exciting weekend.

I work in advertising so I’m probably the worst person to talk about this, but it is incredible not only the amount of products they try and flog you, but the lengths to which they have gone with them. There is even a ‘gift registry’ card they hand out, with no less than 63 different categories of crap that you need to buy.
For example, one of the modern ‘must haves’ is the baby monitor. See I thought this was going to be a glorified two-way radio thing, that we could use to hear if the baby is crying or not, and occasionally pick up some truckies saying “breaker breaker rubber ducky”.

How wrong was I. A ‘baby monitor’ nowadays is a 1080P High-Def LCD monitor, with Dolby Digital 7.1 surround sound and 3D capabilities. I’m not even excited for Avatar 2 anymore, because I can just watch a baby fart on one of these things. Everything also comes with 7 million different accessories. With the amount of add-ons they have for a pram, I’m bloody hoping that when you put them all together it turns into Voltron.

Baby carriers are so hot right now. My wife was having a mad stress over which ones were safest, and which wouldn’t get hot in summer, and so on, but my main concern was over which one allowed me the visual field and hand clearance to play Call of Duty while carrying the baby. Here is a photo of me testing one out with a stunt baby, which I have placed upside down.

At the end of the day though, we all know that Mum gets the raw end of the deal in all of this, so we chin up and do our best. I just wish they would install a bar or something in one of these places.