Shopping with Scifi hubby can be a little like trying to shop with a four year old in tow. We have to go into every toy shop, check every aisle of hotwheels cars and every bookshop for graphic novels. He doesn’t want to stop to eat, or have coffee and doesn’t have a lot of patience with me clothes shopping. So you can understand that I was over the moon when our friends at Reed Comics offered to let me use their ‘man crèche’ facilities!

I’ve mentioned our friends who run the online comic shop before and they frequently save ‘our’ skins when no one else can source a specific book or toy. We were visiting their local area for a few days recently and had planned to see them for dinner when, knowing I wanted to go clothes shopping, they made this awesome suggestion. I could drop Scifi hubby off at their offices in the morning and collect him later and Scifi friend Mat could join him too. They would feed and water them and make sure they didn’t get into too much trouble. Cue lots of jokes about putting a ball pool in the spare office (Bazinga!), finding Batman playmats for him and what time nap time was.

Now of course there’s a risk to leaving Scifi hubby unsupervised in a comic shop all day. I knew that this would be a rather expensive crèche if he had all day to pore over everything in their stock and catalogues but boy was it worth it. I got a whole day shopping, found everything I wanted, stopped for lunch and didn’t look like a stressed parent by the end of it.

I returned to the offices to find out how much damage Scifi hubby had done to the bank balance and discovered him, in true crèche style, sitting on the floor playing with boxes.

For a minute I had images of him preferring the boxes to the contents and that maybe I’d got away with it but apparently he had actually bought so much stuff that we couldn’t get it all home in the suitcases. The Reeds had kindly offered to store a whole pile of things for him until we visit by car later in the year. There’s now a ‘Scifi hubby corner’ in their offices. Thanks guys!

There’s a business idea in man crèche though – can I book him in for next time please?

Wampa update: he is still in the fridge and has now been joined by Luke Skywalker hanging from the roof…