Mum's New World

I visited my sister last week and I was treated to lots of cuddles with my beautiful four-month-old niece. I was quite taken with a new playmat they had recently bought. (A sentence I never thought I’d write.) It has a little piano at the end, for kicking feet to play. Ingenious. My sister revealed that within two hours of ordering it online, it was on her doorstep. The power of the Fast Track Delivery Service.

On the face of it, this sounds brilliant. But then as our conversation continued, we uncovered a deeply uncomfortable truth. There’s a conspiracy that’s targeting sleep-deprived new mums: 2.30am too-goodto-be-true, can’t-live-without-it online shopping opportunities.

I’ve written before about my slight obsession with buying vintage skirts on eBay. That I often stay up too late, scrolling relentlessly through pages of tat on my phone. Even when it’s getting toward midnight though, I’m still of sound mind enough to recognise what I should (or should not) be buying. But add another three hours onto that, an incomplete sleep cycle and suckling newborn, then anything goes.

My memories of nights with my two as tiny babies are a haze of cosy breastfeeding, the (very loud) beep of the Perfect Prep formula machine, comatose breast pumping, crazy dreams about misplacing babies amongst bed sheets and lots of Facebook scrolling. Then those sneaky adverts started to appear, tempting my addled brain into buying stuff I definitely didn’t need. If Facebook helps advertisers to target us based on our posts, comments and likes, then what on earth have I been doing? My feed is full of harem pants and friendship bracelets.

With this array of wares, my zombified online shopping sprees are fairly low risk. Not so though, for an unfortunate friend of my sister’s. So tired was she one fateful night, that she accidentally purchased not one set of nursery furniture, but three. Two from eBay and one off Gumtree. She and her husband awoke to the glorious news that two full bedroom suites would be arriving that week, and the third needed collecting from Norwich.

Delivery is now so speedy, that items arrive before you’ve even remembered buying them. I’ve had parcels arrive from China containing random ‘free + p&p’ items that I’ve had to hide under the bed while I trawl through my Paypal statement to check that I was actually mad enough to buy them. It’s incredible what the brain does when it’s tired. Sleep deprivation has been used as a form of torture, because it renders victims vulnerable to persuasion. This was proved one day, when a friend arrived to meet me at a play cafe without her purse. As she came to pay for a packet of Pom-Bears, she realised in horror that she’d left it on her bedside table, having joined two conflicting political parties after a red-eye ‘The Guardian’ binge.

I can only draw one conclusion from this: I won’t be having any more babies, because my bank balance simply wouldn’t cope.

Written by Kirsty Nicholls, www.sweetpea.media