I have never been a particular fan of reality TV shows, but this one really does have to be the lowest of the low.

Competion to “win” a baby in a new adoption reality TV show.

This is sick, sick, sick, sick, sick. Please tell me that it’s just a wind up – a belated April Fool’s joke.

Link found on a thread on Mumsnet.

“Mummy, Mummy… I want THAT one!”

It’s our little McDonalds ritual (no we don’t take him *that* often… this is still commentary on yesterday’s trip) – Akra Jr goes up to the toy display and decides which toy he’d like in his Happy Meal. He’s almost always disappointed as they usually only have one available at any one time, but at least it keeps him occupied while we’re waiting in the queue.

This time, however, there was another little boy who looked around 5 or 6 years old doing the same thing. “You don’t want THAT one…” he spurns Akra Jr’s choice of Tessie Bear “that’s a GIRL!” I watch without intervening, curious to see how Akra Jr will interact. He looks slightly confused but sticks to his guns. That’s the one he wants.

Then, out of the blue, one of the staff members intervenes. “Of course he doesn’t want that one, he wants a BOY TOY doesn’t he!” and starts pointing out alternative “more suitable” Noddy characters.

EH?! Akra Jr is THREE YEARS OLD! A) he’s old enough to make up his own mind and be very clear what he wants, and B) somehow I don’t think that choosing a female teddy bear plastic figure is really going to mar his manhood at such an early age.

He faltered. Changed his mind. Decided he wanted the wobbly man character instead. It made me feel really sad – I thought we’d have at least another year or two before he entered into the realm of anything even remotely girly being undesirable.

Of course, as usual, all the choice was in vain. He got a PC Plod in his Happy Meal.

We treated ourselves to dinner at McDonalds this evening (yeah, yeah, boo hiss, I know, I know) and while eating we pondered their new slogan “I’m lovin’ it!” – possibly the most bland and unmemorable slogan for a major multi-national out there. The old one was probably better, only that was so memorable we just can’t bring it to mind right now.

There have been some great (or at least less forgettable) slogans out there. You can pretty much name all the Coca Cola slogans of our impressionable years (“Coke Is It!”, “The Real Thing”, “Always Coca Cola”, “Eat Football, Sleep Football, Drink Coca Cola”) yet even they have gone the way of the bland for their latest “Life Tastes Good”. Nike have been rather more sensible – have they ever changed their slogan from “Just Do It”? If they have, it passed us by.

In fact, we struggled to name many contempory advertising slogans at all. Is it now the fashion to have insipid, forgettable lines to promote your wares these days? Or is it just that as we’ve got older our brains are decaying and we don’t expose ourselves to quite as much retail propaganda?

And just what *was* the previous McDonalds slogan, anyway?!

Ten things I’m looking forward to once I’m no longer pregnant, listed in no particular order:

1. Sleeping on my back.
2. Getting out of a bath without creating a small tidal wave in the bathroom.
3. Becoming reacquainted with my toes.
4. Being able to eat a large meal without finishing off with a swig of Gaviscon.
5. Not needing a ten minute rest after the exertion of climbing the stairs.
6. Losing the waddle.
7. Having a supermarket shop entirely consisting of soft cheese, paté and alcohol.
8. Going a whole week without seeing the inside of a hospital.
9. Being able to relay my own horror birth story rather than being subjected to everyone else’s.
10. Getting to know the newest member of our family.

… just had an update on costs to get the Rover through its MOT. Costs have now gone up to £900+ to get it road worthy.

*hums the funeral march for the car*

Well that’s one decision made!

I have been given a date for my induction at last: Monday 10th May.

So relieved and so nice to know exactly when the baby will be here – makes organisation so much easier – funny that at the start of all this I was really keen to go to term and to have a home birth, now (after all the complications) I just want it out and to know there’s an end to all this. It’s also feels like I’m “cheating” as I get to “miss” the last couple of weeks of pregnancy!

Anyway, this blog may be a little light on and after May 10th, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’ll be due to a good cause. I won’t abandon you for too long, promise.

With Akra’s car spectacularly failing its MOT today, we decided to weigh up a few more options, one of which was to ditch his Rover, trade in my Micra and go for a new Nissan Almera SE Extras that we would share. Logic being that we could just about cope with one car between us and it would make more financial sense to own a reliable car that also had the boot space to fit more than … well … a boot.

So we duly sauntered over to our local Nissan dealer, found a very good deal on a very nice spec car, arranged a test drive and started crunching numbers. Problem: by turning in the Micra one year early (we own it on a lease pay scheme), our net equity is just over £9. My poor little beautiful car is worth under a tenner to us! Still, I suppose it’s a bonus that we wouldn’t actually owe them money to take it away.

Akra Jr had far more sense than the adults in the room though, when asked which car he liked best he chose the 350Z – that boy already has an eye for a motor. I think we might be able to afford one of the hubcaps…

We’ve spent most of the evening crunching numbers and assessing options and we still haven’t come to any firm conclusions. Throwing more money at the Rover to keep it on the road another year (approximately £400-500 when the value is only £1250 and there are no guarantees something else won’t go wrong with it in the next twelve months) seems like throwing good money after bad. However, we’re not really quite ready to be a one car family again, losing all that convenience especially now we’ve moved away from a decent public transport area – we wouldn’t be able to fund a new or used car for Akra without giving up the monthly payment on the Micra.

Dilemma.

The Almera is a really nice car though. But is it nice enough?

We took full advantage of the weather today and declared it a lazy day. Yes, there were chores we probably should have done, but they’re not really important, it’s not as if we only have two weeks before the arrival of the baby or anythi…. oops.

As a part of our active idleness programme, I sauntered down to Tescos to pick up a Sunday paper. This is a rare, once-in-a-blue-moon event as having the time to sit down and really read a paper is something we may aspire to once the children are of school age, but not really feasible in our current lives. When I got there though, I had a bit of a dilemma. Which Sunday paper to get? It’s so rare that we get to read them, that the importance of making the right choice was far more at the forefront.

As an aside, have you noticed how the paper you read says something significant about you? People have very fixed ideas about the differences between, say, a Sun reader and a Telegraph reader? So, with no fixed allegiance as such, what does that make me?

When I was growing up, the papers I had most access to was The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday. Okay, it’s convenient to hold and will fit on even the smallest of dining room tables, but on the whole, reading more than a page or two these days produces an overwhelming urge for me to vomit, so that was out…

I do like the idea of a small, easy-to-hold tabloid paper, but without the actual tabloid content. Unfortunately, the smaller size papers don’t seem to have reached Worcestershire quite yet, or at least not our local Tesco branch.

In the end, I bought TWO papers: The Independent and The Observer. I tend to like the journalistic slant of the online Guardian when I get a chance to browse, so its Sunday version (Observer) seemed like a logical choice, and also I wanted to see if the Independant lived up to its name and was fairly politically balanced.

I did quite enjoy both (The Observer more than The Independant – the latter I found balanced but bland and generally aimed at a lifestyle way above my own) but when push comes to shove, I could really only reach one logical conclusion…

…it’s a terrible waste of time sitting down to read the Sunday papers, isn’t it?!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before my exasperation at the media and government’s obsession with childhood obesity at the moment. It worries me intensely that the only result will be an epidemic of weight-obsessed people, eating disorders and osteoporosis as children are “forced” onto calorie-controlled diets before they’ve finished properly growing. If I had my way, any sort of weight-loss regimen would be banned before the age of 18, and the focus would be on moderate healthy exercise and getting vaguely edible stuff into school canteens.

I found it refreshing then, to stumble across this article in the Guardian today about The Big Fat Con Story, an exerpt from the book “The Obesity Myth” by Paul Campos. It looks in particular at the idea of Body Mass Index being a false guide to how healthy you are, and how life-expectancy is actually not connected to your weight. The most scary part of the article for me, is where research showed that 70% of black and hispanic women were happy with their bodies compared to 10% of white women. The conclusion was that black and hispanic women, rather than being praised for their positive self-images, should be targetted by specific dietry advertising. Far better that they should be as neurotic as the white women after all…

… stupid titles goes to… *drum roll*…. *lights dim as the host removes the card from the golden envelope*…

The film industry has its Oscars, the TV industry has the BAFTAS, what does the Internet get? The Webbys.

If ever there was a name to NOT encourage being taken seriously, I think that was it. Oscars and BAFTAS sound distinguished, worth of respect. The Webbys just sounds like a very bad children’s cartoon about spiders.

It’s a shame really, because a brief explore of the site and this year’s nominations (the awards were originally started in 1996) it looks to be a fair representation of the industry (as opposed to a US-centric egofest a lot of the net award type events seem to be) – it’s certainly given me a few new quality sites to browse at leisure. Nice to see that the BBC have deservedly been nominated in quite a few categories too. Will be interesting to see the cross-section of winners…