Posted By Laura in In the Home, Kid's rooms, Out and About, Review, Shopping, Toddler | 3 comments

The thing with Baby Changing Bags isn’t so much the design, these days – there are lots of them around, one to suit most people, and fewer and fewer are decorated with teddy bears. No, it’s more the fact that you only have a baby for a short period of time. But you have children for much MUCH longer.
My children are now 11, 9, 7 and 3 – and I still find that a normal handbag doesn’t quite cut it. Of course I can just get a roomy one. But that involves a heap of rummaging when there’s a toilet emergency (yes, at 7 and 9 they *still* have toilet emergencies), a snack is required or you need to find your sunglasses.
After years of having a bag with enough pockets for a filing system, an ordinary bag just doesn’t cut it for a busy Mum.
But baby changing bags will insist on looking like… baby changing bags.
And with no baby, not even a pushchair, is a tricky look to carry off with my usual chic stylishness *cough*.
But then those gorgeous babes at Babes with Babies suggested the answer may lie in a Storksak of the Jamie persuasion.

Not so! Said I. For tis a Man Bag. Not a me-bag.

Hush, they cried.

You Know Nothing, they sighed.

And sent it anyway.

Apparently, they were right.
I.

Know.

Nothing.

The Jamie Storksak is bee-yoo-ti-ful. The leather is the quality I would expect from any decent handbag (it even comes with the ultimate proof – it’s own dust bag. A sure tell that this comes in the ‘posh bag’ category, yes?).

It’s not ‘pretty’ – but it’s effortlessly stylish in a go-anywhere-with-your-bag-held-high fashion. The leather is so good it’s strokeable. The quality is unquestionable… but what about the practicality?

Well – it’s capacious enough to hold everything I needed for a day trip out with all four children. And I still had room for a handful of stones which HAD to come home with us. And a gorgeous red leaf.
It will hold a book for me while waiting in the after-school-clubs dead time.
But it will also file away neatly wipes, keys, sunglasses, phone, pens, notepad, hairbrush and clips (after 3 boys this is a new requisite for me with a pink 3yr old), 2 small dinosaurs and a bottle of water. All neatly filed and ready to hand.

I LOVE this bag. I do. It is grown up, stylish, of gorgeous quality and thoughtfully, perfectly, designed.

There’s just one problem.

The Husband’s eyes lit up with a proprietorial gleam when he saw it. And when I need it, it’s rarely where I left it – the contents will be there, but the bag itself is often to be found languishing near his desk, filled with HIS laptop and Boy Stuff (this is the first bag EVER to come into this house which he has seen fit to appropriate for his own uses).
So it’s a Man Bag too (I DO know something, after all). And he does love it very much, too.

I keep telling him to keep his hands to himself. This bag is mine, mine mine, and will be much loved by me for many MANY years to come.

Let the Bag Wars commence.