ARGH. AAAARGH!

It's reading week and my eyeballs have finally stopped bleeding from all the reading I've been doing all term.
Naturally this means that today I have to start reading again because I have some serious bleeding on which to catch up.

Before I do this, I want to share something with you, and I promise it'll be the last of this sort of topic for a while. I'm preparing you in advance because it has to do with my daughter, and there's been two posts in a row or so with her as the main focus and I don't want the two people who read these posts to get sick of her.

Not that this could happen (she's ihumanly cute) BUT STILL!

No, this is a rant, and it's only tangentially about her, but you're forewarned. Today, I'm pissed off about diapers.

"Whaaaat?"

Yes. Diapers. You heard me. Specifically the branded ones in pharmacies. See, my daughter's getting on in years, and she's decided at two years and two months that she's going to potty train herself. Go figure. We were just going to wait until she was old enough to fit into Depends and just leave it at that with a graceful transition as Child Services drags us away kicking and screaming about constitutional rights.

So the other day, with no prompting, she decides she's old enough to get rid of diapers. Things never being as easy as they look, after an order of magnitude increase in laundering she's decided that diapers are occasionally ok, but we decided to help her along the way that we would get her some trainer pants.

Hey, it's cool. We tried out the cotton diaper solution, but it's too high maintenance when she's in daycare, and I've never been as green as all that (except when changing the things) so trainers it is.

Except when you get to the pharmacy to buy some, they're always in those revolting and traditional blue and pink shades.

Well, we can deal with that, it's not so freaking bad, but where I had to draw some kind of ideological line was the fact that these things are all branded with nauseating film creatures. Disney has a stranglehold on diapers, and the mainstream brands are all princesses (from about three or four different disney flicks) for girls and Cars (from the movie) for boys.

See, newborn diapers are unbranded and can even occasionally be colour-code free, but the slimy little marketers who run the universe know that a two-year old has phenomenal manipulation power over their parents (oh you have no idea) and an incredibly visual brand memory. So when you see the movie with your kids and then they see the pictures on the diaper package, they'll want that brand while they whine at you for a McDonalds meal where the Kid's Joyous McFeast of the day comes with a movie-branded toy.

Face it, they have you nailed from Inpoot to outpoot. It's disgusting and I hate it. There are laws agains direct marketing to children, but this sort of thing is blatant as well, and the packages areinvariably on lower shelves and upper shelves, because the kids are either going to be carried at shoulder height or walking around floor level. Middle shelves are reserved for the unpopular, generic in-house brands.

And even the no-name brands are guilty of the same, only they don't have the marketing pull that the megacorps have, so they get to stencil less popular shows on your child's crotch.

And guess what? After a certain size of diaper (when you child reaches about 50-60 pounds) the diapers are unbranded once again.

It's because by then they already have you hooked and you're another hopeless cog in the soul-grinding consumer marketing machine. Besides, if you have a 60 pound kid still wetting themselves, they probably feel insecure enough as it is about themselves without having to look down at soggy, distorted crotch princesses all the time.