Mom’s Guide To Kids Gift Giving
The birthday party at the bouncy house was a total success! When it was all said and done I started thinking about the part of a kids party that always seems to be the most chaotic: gift opening time.
I’m not keen on the fact that the process of opening presents quickly becomes a contest of unwrapping everything as fast as you can without taking time to oooh and aaahhh over each one and telling the person who brought it how much you love it.
Not only that, but all the other kids get so excited that they’re usually surrounding the birthday boy/girl with a gift in hand shouting “open this one! open this one!”
We brought Serophina’s presents home and I realized that things were so frenzied when she was opening gifts, there were quite a few things we had that I had no idea who they were from! I had a moment of panic, what would I write in the thank you cards? What if I got the givers and the gifts mismatched? That would be embarrassing.
At that moment I decided from now on when I give gifts to children, I will stick a label on the actual gift that says exactly who it’s from. Why place such important information on the wrapping paper when it just gets torn apart before you can figure out who it’s from? A lot of times a card will be in with the gift bag, but the cards get tossed in with the tissue paper and pulled out before you have a chance to intercept it and figure out which bag it came from.
I’ve also decided that if I give a gift that has a lot of pieces, I’m going to include a plastic bin with it so that when everything is out of the box, all the pieces will already have a home to get put away in. My friend did this with a tea set that she got for Serophina. It had 30+ pieces, so she also gave us a little plastic bin that all the pieces fit nicely into. I thought this was GREAT idea and a very thoughtful tip from one Mom to another.
What ideas do you have about gifts and children?
