The twins turned seven, and for me it meant not just “O MY BABIES ARE GROWING UP” but also “O MAN THIS IS A LOT OF PRESENT IDEAS TO COME UP WITH.”
One of the more surprising successes was a calculator (photo from Amazon.com) for Edward. He’d kept stealing mine, so I wondered if he might like to have one of his own—and although his first reaction was not quite the level of THRILL a person might be looking for in a birthday gift reaction, he’s played with it nearly every day since.
My parents bought LittleMissMatched socks (photo from LittleMissMatched.com) for Elizabeth. I had the fun of choosing, so I chose all from the buy-3-sets-get-1-set-free section, to reduce the pain of paying THREE dollars PER sock PLUS shipping. This was a great gift idea for grandparents, because I KNEW Elizabeth really wanted the socks but I was having a hard time getting over the hurdle of the price (and the SUPER annoyance of not being able to use a free shipping code on an order containing buy-3-get-1). My mom: “Pish! They’re perfect! Let’s order them!”
For Edward, my parents bought a rainbow Magnicube. I gave them the suggestion even though the magnet-swallowing stories freak me out, because Edward has wanted these for YEARS and I kept saying no no no no because Henry was too young. Now Henry is five and I am just going to live with my vivid fantasies of the children getting emergency x-rays followed by emergency intestinal surgery. (No. Don’t tell me any more stories. I have heard the stories.) And the Magnicube is a huuuuuuuge hit: daily playing. And, since he wanted the multicolored set, there’s been lots of pattern practicing.
This was Elizabeth’s funniest present: we got her this double-armful-sized stuffed penguin she loved (photo from Amazon.com) plus the SAME penguin in regular-stuffed-animal-sized, large-grapefruit-sized and comically-small-backpack-clip-on-sized. Imagine the four round wrapped presents lined up on the table.
It wouldn’t be a holiday if Edward didn’t want a video game. This time it was PaperMario (photo from Amazon.com). I was glad it was one of the $20 ones instead of one of the $40 ones.
I think Elizabeth is finally tiring of Sticky Mosaics, but she’d hoped to get a set for her birthday and so I got her the owls set (photo from Amazon.com). This one has shaped backgrounds instead of the more typical rectangles, and that’s been fun for a change.
I have mixed feelings about “character” products, and those feelings are this: (1) I hate the look of them, (2) unless my kids love them, in which case I suddenly love the thrill factor of them. Edward had mentioned fervently that something he REALLY WANTED was his OWN UMBRELLA, and then I saw this Mario one at Target at 50% off, so I bought it. Big success.
