What's almost harder than giving birth?

Building Wolf's early 1st birthday present. Flat-packed like IKEA furniture, it always sounds a lot easier than it actually is in practice. Our apartment is full of IKEA furniture, but none of it built by me. That's what Josh is for: taking out the trash, heavy lifting, anything reasonably gross and building furniture. 

I stupidly started as soon as it had been delivered and ripped out of it's excessive packaging. The postman kindly warned me to watch out for babies with walkers, as they tend to crash into your shins a lot. Wolf was still awake while I built and so tried to climb my back as I struggled to follow some somewhat brief and vague instructions (to someone like me anyway...I like words! Complex descriptions! Not numbers and diagrams. Urgh). A couple of hours later it was finished but not without a lot of sweat, tears, yelling and sore hands. If I forget about all that, this is a pretty awesome toy. It's called 'Grow up - the transformable toy' made by an Italian company called Mishi. It starts of as this walker, then can be transformed into a ride on and then a trolley. Very useful.

Of course I didn't actually put it together properly, so we had gotten home (after a surprisingly successful night in the city hanging out at the bike store Josh works at), Josh took it apart and fixed it. I know I should have waited for him anyway, but I was too excited for Wolf. He seemed pretty ambivilant at first, but he loves it now. Tears up and down the apartment crashing into walls and things. 

We ordered ours from Cow Trees, a gorgeous Brunswick toy store that used to be located on Lygon Street until a truck crashed into a fire hydrant outside. While they fix up their flagship, they're still operating their great online store. At $150 They have the best price for the Grow Up I've seen, which goes for between $180-$200 at most other stores, online or otherwise. This is a really nice wooden walker, and I'm happy that it should last Wolf from now till about 6 years of age as a functional toy. Considering a lot of other nice wooden walkers cost between $120-$250 and last a much shorter period of time, I think the Grow Up might really be worth it. It looks quite cute too and comes in another two colours: purple and pink or green and orange.