It's guest-posty time!! This is a post from a very, very good friend of mine. Her name is Emma and she's a brand newbie blogger. You can Follow her on Twitter here.
And when I say a very, very good friend of mine, I mean it. Emma has been one of my best mates since the day I started a new high school, age 13, and she refused to let me sit next to her on the school bus. Bitch.
I am very excited to be guest posting here at the home of RRSAHM!
Lori absolutely has to be the coolest person I know. I also happen to
know that she almost has her Christmas shopping, shopped and wrapped. Bless
her organised jellybean print cotton socks....... I could only
wish.
Shopping and I have have never been friends.
We tend to tolerate each other for the required amount of time. I am guilty
of canceling our Dates last minute and postponing them for as
long as possible.
I get a headache even thinking about Christmas shopping.
My family is large, and we are successfully multiplying like the
plague, my Christmas list now requires a bag of its own to transport
it around.
When I was a kid and my parents had a "meeting with Santa" My grandparents
would take us shopping and give us $20 to buy a gift for our siblings and
the freaked out flower children.
We didn't get pocket money in our house until we were 12, so $20 was the
most amount of money I'd ever held in my tiny grubby little hands, and the
equivalent of winning lotto.
I picked some pretty crap presents on those shopping trips. One year I gave
my dad (an artist) a dinner plate, .....just one. " To mix paints on!
like a palette" I explained when he opened it.
I gave mum a piece of Australiana jewelery that taste forgot and a bar of
soap with a "scented wrapper", once you opened the bar of almost 100%
S.L.S, your eyes stung and it smelt like it might generate random
bouts of herpes.
Hehehe. You want nothing? OK then. Stolen from here.
Both gifts were always received with a genuine "oh will you look at
that,... that's just perfect... thanks love" That's going straight
to the pool room.
My sister ( the Midwife) was much easier to buy for, she would have done
her rounds of the shop with organised planning and expert list ticking and
would have handed my brother and I exactly what we were buying her that
year..... Easy.
I wish I had inherited her organisational genes, but it seems she had used
the last of the "organised, tidy and lactose tolerance" and by the time I
arrived they had already started on the procrastinators box.....*sigh*
My brother wasn't hard to buy for either. He liked 2 things, cars or
weapons of any sort. The freaked out flower children had a strict no guns,
toys of war or violence policy in our house,...... so a car it was.
This policy had to be reviewed and relaxed with the arrival of Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles....... Hero's in a
half shell.... turtle power!.....sorry.
That show was like crack to my then 7 year old brother. He was such a sweet
thing with golden ringlets and big blue eyes, he would only have to pop one
lime green VHS and he was numchucking and air kicking his way around the
backyard, taunting his orange tree opponent, knocking off it's fruit with a
large stick. Samurai.
My little brother, being the only boy in our family for a number of years,
often got the arse end of the playtime deal.
His prized Jeep's and Tonka's were pilfered and used as Barbies tour bus. I
remember him sitting begrudgingly through many of her dance party's and
"be" skipper. He would do this on the promise we would get to play
what he wanted to next. Mostly we did but sometimes it was just dinner time
and hardly our fault.
We once made a bike track around the cubby house and the Midwife and I
would man the new drive through restaurant. My brother would ride from
window to window on his bike, paying with gravel and leaves, riding
off off and returning about 20 seconds later usually after some sort
of tyre spinning display and motorbike sounds for dramatic effect.
The toys of today require little imagination mostly, and if that's not bad
enough, it seems you can't even buy the whole toy anymore... shelf after
shelf of ** box only, useful part of the toy sold separately.**
Editors Note: Emma get's a mo'. I've decided that's the price for guesting here at RRSAHM.
Soooo, when I stop procrastinating.....(writing blogs and alike), and I
find a park at my local teeny bopper central, I will try to look for toys
that will encourage independent and imaginative play. They are the
best kind of gift.
They are the only kind I remember in enough detail to write about.