Shopaholic With An Excuse

Having kids is great, because I get to indulge my inner shopaholic. Living in Finland, a country with four distinct seasons, there’s always something on my shopping list.

Don’t get me wrong, there are other good sides to having kids, obviously! They are adorable and remind me that some people really do have hearts of pure gold.

They give me an excuse to go see my colleague’s puppy.

I get to beam with pride when they learn to swim or score a goal.

And they say funny things, like “Yo is hi in daddy language,” and “I’d like to go to Australia one day, but can we please leave our coats at home, because it’s hot over there?”

Now, I don’t know if I did something wrong, but my kids get terribly excited whenever I tell them we are expecting new raincoats or socks in the mail. Since the poor kids can’t expect a puppy of their own with a mum who’s allergic, at least I’m comforted by knowing they’ll appreciate good outdoors wear or reasonably priced firefighter prints. My favourite print has dogs surfing while holding cameras.

I certainly don’t remember caring for clothes at their age, but then again I wore a uniform to school. Uniforms are like the opposite of clothes, in a way. My boys, on the other hand, wear superhero shirts, or even entire superhero outfits to daycare. Today, I had to walk over to daycare twice, because in my sleepy, groggy state I had arrived there with two kids on bikes and one Batman outfit short.

Online shopping has become a bit of an addiction and I’m always scouting around for sales and second hand items now. Comparing clothes and prices online is just so easy, compared to pre-pandemic and pre-kids real-life shopping, when I actually had to burn calories wandering around and carrying my own bags.

When I visited Honolulu years ago, I was surprised at a shop assistant asking me if she could take the clothes I wanted to try into the dressing room to wait for me, freeing my hands for more purchasing. But over here, that would never happen. At some point, pre-online shopping just had to end because I’d run out of hands. There was a limit to it.

Online, there are no such problems and I even order our groceries online. You could even go as far as to order pharmacy products, but thank goodness, I’m not there yet. There is still room for growth in this hobby of mine.

The fun thing is that if you order pharmacy products in certain areas of town, they’ll drop them off in a drone. A drone! In this country of introverts and engineers marrying introverts and engineers, I’m sure they were already planning this way before the pandemic. Wanting to avoid people has never been this popular, but it’s always been around.

In the online shopping business, things don’t always go smoothly, though. I ordered some extravagant shampoo just to feel pampered, and my order was delivered to my neighbour two floors down. After some detective work, I located it and brought it home only to realise I’d ended up getting someone else’s soaps (but not the neighbour’s). Rose, lavender and vanilla soaps were packed inside, along with a birthday surprise: an enourmous basket. No wonder the shampoo package had been so large and clumsy!

The store then sent a courier to pick it up in exchange for my real order, but he claimed had no idea he was supposed to pick anything up and now I think he just pampered himself with the pink, scented soaps and picnic basket. All jobs must have their perks, eh?

I do try to have other hobbies, but I’m largely misunderstood by my living companions. When I was attending a creative writing group, my kids asked their dad some tricky questions.

“Where’s mummy?”

“She’s at a writing course learning to write.”

“Doesn’t she know how to write?”

“Err… yes, but she wants to write better.”

“Does she write poorly?”

“No comments.”

Unsatisfied, the questioning continued the next day.

“Mummy, did you sit on one of those little chairs we have at daycare?”

“Mmm, no, what do you mean?”

“When you were at daycare learning to write.”

Whatever I do, it always comes back to daycare and my two trendsetters in Easter Batman outfits. Shopping is just one of those mummy ordeals that we have to deal with.