Comparing Homes

I'm back in Canada at the moment and have been noticing some of the little differences between where we live in England to where my parents live in Canada. Just a few things I've noticed this past week.

• Rounded curbs, rather than straight edge ones, are the norm here in the suburbs.
• Bigger parking spaces everywhere, but not much reserved parking for parents with little kids.
• Cheaper gas. It's $1.30CDN/litre (£0.65GBP) here compared to £1.20GBP/litre ($2.42CDN) in England.
• My elementary school no longer has school patrol in the mornings or afternoons because hardly anyone walks to school anymore. I will post more on this another day. Stay tuned.
• There is just starting to be organic products in the grocery stores, but it is still a young market. This was similar when we were in Australia too.
• 30°C is more scorching here as there is no cloud cover with that kind of temperature, so you get no breaks from it. However England tends to be more humid and therefore feels stickier at that temperature.
• As in Australia, there are lots of garage sales around. In England there is very rarely garage or yard sales. I've never seen one at least. It seems most people take the stuff to boot sales, where you sell your stuff out of the back of your car.

That's a short list of small differences. It's funny what you notice and what you don't. I'm sure there are other obvious things that I just don't notice because I'm too used to both the English and the Canadian ways.

Organic snow

The title of this post isn't actually accurate, but it sounded cool to me.

In two previous posts I talked about organic fruit and veg delivery companies. Abel & Cole and Chiltern Organics (mentioned here and here, respectively). Well, I found yet another company that delivers organic produce to our area which is called Eat Organic. I still haven't ordered from any of them, but now that things have settled down a bit, I should. I have ordered from Tescos and ASDA and will have a rant about ASDA in the next few days.

Also, G has updated our website with a post of his own and some very nice pictures of Cookham in the snow. Click the link and check them out!

Mothercare - A mild rant

When the c'lonials take over this island, one of the first things to go will be Mothercare. For those who don't know, Mothercare is a chain store here in Britain that sells everything you need from pregancy through to toddler years. Sounds fantastic to have everything under one roof, but sounding fantastic and being fantastic are two different things.

There is a large Mothercare store in Slough, where we have been several times and have found the staff to be pretty useless. We went there at the beginning of December, looking for a stroller/pram/thingy. We walked around the display of 25 or so strollers, a bit overwhelmed by what we were looking at and not being sure where to start. Since noone offered to help us, after about 5-10 minutes of looking, we grabbed a member of staff and asked her which ones had car seats that integrated into the strollers. She said she wasn't familiar with the car seats, so she would find a colleague to help us. Another 5 minutes pass. Finally the car-seat expert showed up. He pointed the strollers that have car seat attachment capability out and said, "If you have any questions, just ask," and then walked away. Well, we had a lot of questions, but didn't know where to start. We didn't see him again in the shop, so we left.

Contrast that to when we went to Bear Essentials (another baby equipment shop) in Maidenhead. When we asked them in general about the strollers, the 2 girls working basically said, "Right, this is our best selling model and here's why", explaining all the features, which car seat fit with it, why they recommended it above the other strollers, but also pointing out the features of the others. They gave us information about it and then answered all our questions, rather than just pointing them out and walking away.

We bought the car seat from Bear Essentials, but still haven't bought a stroller. As we were driving past the Slough Mothercare yesterday, we thought we'd take another look in, since we now have a slightly better idea of what we are now looking for. Again, in a near empty shop, I walked around the strollers for a good while without anyone offering to help me. I asked one of the girls about them again, and she pointed them out, nothing more really. When I saw a model that fits the car seat we already have, I asked if she could show me how the car seat fits into the stroller. She had to go off and get her colleague to do it, as she didn't know how. So the assistant manager came over to show us how to remove the stroller seat to attach the car seat. He struggled with the seat material for a long time, several minutes at least, having been pushing where he should have been pulling. Then, when he finally got it the back cover off, the stroller had two left adapters instead of a right and a left, so we couldn't try it out anyways. What a pain.

I've also been to the Mothercare in Maidenhead and wasn't overly impressed with it either. Nothing particularly wrong with it, other than when I went in there, I was the only shopper and the 3 members of staff didn't stop for half a second from their gabbing with each other to greet me or ask if I was looking for anything specific. No, sorry, that's wrong, they did, once I had been in the shop for about 20 minutes.

Amazing that I could post about the great shopping service at one place less than a week ago and now complain about the total lack of service at another. But that's the way it is in life. To use the British expression, "It's swings and roundabouts". My final comment is basically, if you live near Maidenhead, Windsor or Slough, I would recommend you go to Bear Essentials if you need baby equipment. Friendly and competent staff, a big contrast from Mothercare.

Shopping service

After our unsuccessful attempt to go shopping on Boxing Day, we tried again on the 27th with a good deal more success. We went to Tescos one of the major supermarket chains in the UK. It was another 24 hour one, but not the one from Boxing Day. I find the definition of "open 24 hours" a bit amusing. They are open 24 hours a day, as long as you want to go shopping from 8am Monday to 10pm Saturday. They are open Saturday and Sunday, but not nights. To me, open 24 hours would mean 7 days a week. I'm glad that I found this out before trying some late Saturday evening. Still they are open longer than most places.

Anyways, I was quite impressed with it, right from the approach. The parking lot doesn't just have disabled parking, but it has parent and tot parking. This is so that parents with small children don't have to slog across the entire lot with groceries and child(ren); they can park close to the entrance exit. I had seen this before, but this Tescos had more than just a token one or two spaces, there were several there. And the best thing, they have an extra meter or so of space between each spot, so you have room to manoeuvre a shopping cart or a stroller beside the car. Also enough room to actually open the door and pull out the baby and car seat without having to resort to yoga-like contortions.

We didn't park there because it was full, but just past it. Next nice thing was - the aisles of parking have a space between them to walk down. So instead of being nose to nose with the next row of cars, there are posts to keep them spaced and a big roomy walking area between. Also much nicer than trying to dodge reversing cars, puddles and so on.

Once we got to the front of the shop, we had a choice of about 5 different types of shopping trolleys. They had the ones shaped like cars for toddlers to ride around in while mom and dad put the groceries in the top section. They had regular trolleys, plus shallower versions of the same for those who don't fill a huge one when buying a week's worth of groceries. Save your back, not having to bend down so low for a few items. Then they had the trolleys with the built-in baby seats. We were considering transferring Lena from her car seat to one of these when we shown another type of trolley by one of the employees. It had a big tray on top, where you could rest the car seat, plus a seat belt to keep it securely in place. I wish I could find a picture to show you what I mean but the Internet seems to be empty of trolley spotters taking pictures of the different types.

I know it might seem silly to be so pleased about a parking space and a shopping trolley, but having spent many years living in a country where I'd be sometimes lucky to find a basket to use to shop with and every trolley demanded a deposit before it could be taken anywhere, it was a nice change.

Shopping and services - online information

I started a price book a week or two ago. A price book, for those who don't know, is a little comparison sheet you make up to compare prices of items in different shops and to help remind you/figure out when certain things go regularly on sale. It's really good to show you how much money you can save by shopping at a cheaper grocery store, even if you are buying exactly the same brand name products.

But now I don't think I need one. I stumbled across a brilliant website that basically does it for me. It's called mySupermarket, and it compares the 4 biggest supermarkets in UK for you. Asda (Wallmart to everyone outside of the UK), Tesco, Sainsbury's and Ocado, which is the online shopping service for Waitrose. You choose the store where you would normally shop, find the items you want to purchase and at the end, it shows you where it might be cheaper to go shopping. It even shows the weekly specials for each shop, so if Waitrose is having a deal of 2 for 1 on packs of cheddar, it will let you know that. The newspaper The Guardian reviewed it and has a good write-up of it here, so no point me repeating it all. The website is even free, so all the better. It doesn't have the super cheap Aldi and Lidl options, both of which I have a soft spot for from my time in Germany; but most shopping for us wouldn't get done there anyways as they are pretty far from us.

Another online shopping option I've found is Abel & Cole. It's a company that does organic home delivery, mainly of produce, but also meats and other things. I haven't actually used them yet, but they look very similar to the service we used in Germany for a while, the Ökokiste. I wonder if they can compete with the big supermarkets on price, as the supermarkets also have a range of organics. I hope so, for their sake.

So these are the two good things I've found. One thing that I've been a lot less successful doing though, is finding information about nappy (aka diaper) services. Both G and I are willing to give reuseable nappies a go, but I'm not keen on spending all my time washing them, nor having them hung all over the house to dry. So we think a service would be our best option, and is apparently the most enviromentally-friendly option out of disposables, washing yourself or a service. Basically they come and collect the dirty ones once a week, leaving you a load of freshly washed and folded ones at the same time.
I've been asking around on several online sites for anyone who has used a nappy service, just to get an idea of what others think. I know there are nappy services, I've found their websites. But I can't find anyone who's used them. I asked a local online parent group (139 members), a cloth nappy online group (327 members) and on the message boards of iVillage(loads and loads of people). Not one single person seems to have used a nappy service.

So now I'm asking the great wide world - have you used a diaper or nappy service? What's your thoughts on it? Please leave a comment!

Transporting the Troops

So we have bought a car. We've had a rental the last 2 weeks, which I've been bravely driving around without incident. But that has to go back on Thursday, so we bought a car. We bought it at a "car supermarket" which is something I hadn't heard of before. Basically, it's a company with lots and lots of cars. The turnover of cars is so high, they can afford to keep the price pretty low. You don't haggle, you don't get to test drive. You can sit in it, start it up, but that's it. The place we went to deals mainly with cars that had been used for companies, so they have a fair amount of mileage on them for relatively new cars. However, they are also several thousand less than the new price for 6-month old cars.

We bought a black Ford Focus. Ford Focuses are apparently Britain's most popular car, so there were several to choose from. For those who like all the nitty-gritty details, it's a 1.4L LX Focus. We did have our eye on a Sport model, but it was already taken when we went back, so we settled for our second choice. There's not a lot of difference between the 2 anyways, and this one was 300 pounds less with less mileage, so we can live without the alloy wheels. It's pretty roomy in the trunk and has 4 doors, so getting the baby and baby equipment around shouldn't be an issue.

The young fellow serving us was pretty amusing. He had had a bad day when we went in to make a down payment on it and was ticked off with all his colleagues and the entire place. So absolutely no hard sell on any of the extras, he just wanted to get out of there. I'm off to get a banker's draft made up for the rest so we can pick it up tomorrow. I'll maybe try and post a picture or two in a few days, both of the car and the area.