Writing -- Baby Talk: Catalogue blues

The following article featured in a weekly column on parenting in the Women on Wednesday supplement of The Evening Echo, one of Ireland's leading regional daily newspapers. It appeared in the 15 December 2004 issue.

Catalogues are the bane of my life!

It all started a few months back when we decided that getting a few catalogues for the girls might be a good idea… they'd enjoy looking through the toy section and it would give us a few ideas when it came to Christmas shopping. It seemed like a winner in theory, but turned out to be completely counterproductive.

There are now about six catalogues in various stages of dismemberment scattered around the living room. We discovered early in the process that one catalogue between the twins simply wasn't going to work, so we picked up another one. Fine, we thought, now that they had one each it would resolve the bickering. What we forgot to do was to take the little one into account. Seeing her big sisters with catalogues she naturally wanted to get involved. She quickly became expert at ripping out pages that the twins were looking at. Well, you can imagine the ruckus that ensued. We now get our catalogues in multiples of three… one each for the twins to browse through and another for their little sister to destroy.

Watching the twins with their catalogues makes me nervous. It gives me a disturbing look into the future, a glimpse at the shopping monsters they could grow up to become. My wallet feels lighter just thinking about it!

Shopping is one of my pet hates, and one of my wife's true passions. The girls, it seems, take after their mother. I subscribe to the hit-and-run school of retail etiquette. I decide what I want way before I hit the shops, then search for the best deal and buy it. It's a quick, relatively painless and straightforward process. My wife, on the other hand, likes to take her time… browsing through an endless procession of outlets before finally selecting what she wants. She's great at it, and inevitably ends up with some amazing bargains, but I find the whole process about as enjoyable as pulling teeth.

The twins spend ages poring over each page, pen in hand, marking the toys that they want for Christmas.

"Can I have one of these Dad?" one of them asks.

"I don't know darling," I reply, trying to be as non-committal as possible.

"Well, Santa's bringing me one of them," says the other one.

"Yes, and I'm having one of these… oh and this one's lovely too…." and so the conversation continues. Practically every-other toy, doll and game in the catalogues are carefully circled to indicate their preferences.

Suffice it to say that the man in the big red suit would need a fleet of sleighs the size of aircraft carriers to deliver everything they've picked out. I've tried to explain that because Santa will be visiting all of the children in the world on Christmas Eve that he only has room for a few presents for everyone. I'm not sure it's sinking in though: they continue to pick out more stuff from their catalogues and seem as convinced as ever that Santa will deliver.

If you've managed to avoid the catalogue trap up to now then well done… keep up the good work and be sure to banish those unhelpful tomes from the house forthwith. And for those of you who are already experiencing the same pre-Christmas catalogue frenzy that I am doomed to endure… my commiserations.