This week one of my blogging friends asked “what are the good things about blogging?”. I answered “well, you get to meet great people, have opportunities for some amazing experiences, and get a creative outlet for all those stories that buzz around your head”. It was only later that I realised I’d missed out possibly the best thing about blogging…

Sometimes you get to do some really silly and fun things…

Last week the geekdaddy and I participated in the Andrex Washlets challenge. Organised by the Tots100 Index, this challenge aimed to pit Mum bloggers against Dad bloggers in the ultimate test to see which gender could communicate better. And the test? Sixty seconds to describe words for your opponent to guess without using certain other words that would have made the whole thing too easy. Taboo, if you will.

Now, I’m not always particularly good at thinking on my feet (as those who were present at the Great Pictionary Challenge of 2013 will attest), but I think I managed to hold my own pretty well in this whole thing. What do you think?

There was a point to all this, which was that Andrex have recently undertaken some research into how men and women communicate, and found that nearly half of all Brits (47%) shy away from having conversations about difficult subjects – more of us shy away from talking about bathroom habits than mental health and sex! The survey also found that women are generally much better at broaching difficult or embarrassing topics. I’m not sure this holds true for the geek family – neither the geekdaddy nor I have ever shied away from talking about anything, and we tend to quite happily talk openly about many topics. We shared our infertility journey quite publicly via podcast for example. And there can’t be many people whose first conversation with their mother-in-law-to-be opened with her saying “welcome, come in, sit down, and tell us about this play you’re in where you take all your clothes off!”*

The geek family are probably more guilty of oversharing than not sharing enough. It will be interesting to see how the other bloggers fared in this challenge, and what their thoughts are about the research. There will shortly be a roundup of all these posts on the Tots100 blog.

What do you think? Do you shy away from the difficult conversations? Have you noticed a difference between how open men are versus women? And would you like a game of Taboo with us some time? 😉

Disclosure: I was not paid anything to take part in the Andrex Washlets challenge, or to post about it. Andrex are offering prizes to the best scoring team and individual in the challenge, but that’s not why we participated. We did it because it sounded fun.

*It was a LONG time ago, and I should point out that I didn’t take ALL my clothes off, and was at no point indecent. And it was all done with the geekdaddy’s knowledge, if perhaps not his full blessing.