Membership has its privileges

This is excellent -- a good friend caught this parking lot image while shopping at the Metropolitan Market (a Seattle-area upscale grocer competing with Whole Foods). *Now* we find out about this! Add it to the list of other pregnancy perks:

• Occasional (though disappointingly rare?) offers to allow Meh to cut in long bathroom lines
• The very civilized (sorry, civilised) offers to give up seats on the London Underground (subway)
• Super tasty non-alcoholic drink alternatives to those fancy wines at The Herbfarm
• ...and people fleeing from seats even remotely nearby when Meh looked for a place to sit at the airport while waiting for her parents' luggage to unload on Saturday. (Seriously, I think one or two people even broke into a run.)

Are there other undocumented perks of pregnancy we missed out on? Besides being able to peruse cute baby stores without having to pretend it's for a niece or nephew, of course. Or if there are good young baby perks we should know about, please let us know! I know Microsoft sends along a care package (of course featuring a tiny little MS-logoed onesie among other things - can dorkiness possibly start at an earlier age?), but we'd love to hear any other tips or recommendations.

In other news, check it out, yet another medical opinion reversal -- this from the good researchers at our very own University of Washington. (Granted, I'm not sure how many doctors really endorsed parking your child in front of Baby Einstein videos for hours on end to begin with, but still...)

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,00.html?cnn=yes

the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos.

I still say even the name of the video series is misleading, unless they're thinking they'll train your baby to drop out of high school and become a patent clerk? Then again, Albert Einstein apparently had speech difficulties early in life, so perhaps these videos are more on target than we think...