I wasn’t really that surprised when almost every invitee to Erica’s party turned up. On the days when she goes to nursery there’s usually a gaggle of excited toddlers waving and shouting to her at the window and before she moved up to the pre-preschool room a few weeks ago (she is now officially a Cheeky Chimp) her toddler room-mates would chatter excitedly to me when I dropped her off. When we go to the park she always makes a friend no matter how dreich the weather and when we first met Amanda and Bron it took a matter of seconds for her to race off with her similarly-aged counterparts. She’s exuberant, effervescent and extremely high maintenance but is the most sociable of all my children. I wouldn’t say she’s more popular than the boys – they have a firm group of friends which tends to be close knit – but her circle of friends is wide and fluid. From my perspective of being distinctly unpopular as a schoolie, I’m enthused by the demand for her friendship but if course, this demand leads to supply issues.

In other words the dreaded birthday party.

Over the last 8 weeks Erica has been invited to no less than six birthday parties, all of which have been held at (an admittedly better-than-usual) soft play centre in a local pub. I should be honest here and say that soft play is an anathema to me – witnessing my children mutate from reasonably polite if excitable dwarves to puce-faced sweaty hulks sustained by chicken nuggets and fruit shoots is not my idea of fun – but they absolutely love it. Therein lies my first ‘concern’. If the kids have been invited to a softplay party, how should they be dressed? Party dresses simply cramp your style when you’re trying to clamber up wipe-clean plastic mountains, but on the few occasions that I’ve dressed Erica in a long tshirt and leggings she’s looked distinctly out of place. How do other parents do it?

Added to that there’s the financial obligation too. Erica was gifted some beautiful presents at her birthday party in May but since Bob & I have been self-employed since the turn of the year we simply don’t have any disposable income right now. As you can imagine, six birthday parties in eight weeks really hits the pocket. I don’t feel comfortable turning down invitations and so I try to stick within a budget of £10 for the gift with a card & wrapping paper on top.

This is where my dilemma lies. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I have some idiosyncracies when it comes to gifts being bought with hard-earned money. There’s nothing that angers me more than my kids breaking something they’ve been bought as a gift because I can remember all too well how long I could eat for if I had £10 while I was a single parent. For someone to spend almost two hours-worth of wages on something means a great deal to me and I want my kids to appreciate that, but I also want anyone I’m buying for to appreciate it too. Hence, I really begrudge buying crappy pointless toys as gifts no matter how much my kids beg me to. We all know the kind of toys I’m referring to – Gogo’s crazy bones are top of my ‘Vonnie hates these’ list, along with those revolting aliens in a plastic tub of slime which Nairn particularly adores – and so I usually resort to books or crafting kits to encourage parent & child to spend time together. BUT THEN I have the guilt for pushing my parenting ideals onto others.

I decided recently to let Erica pick the present for her friend, but that backfired spectacularly when she – who has a new-found love of gardening – decided that her friend J REALLY needed a massive strawberry planter from B&Q. I bought it since it was clearly a gift from the heart then bought a kite as an apology to his parents for handing over a bucket of mud to look after.

There’s got to be a happy medium, surely? Do other parents stick to a birthday budget? Do you have a policy about the kind of gift you’ll buy? Most importantly, what are your fashion principles?

Posted under family

Ask any of my friends about my timekeeping and they’ll laugh, grimace and shake their heads. I have zero concept of time, I’m almost always late and at each of my children’s birthdays I will repeat, “I can’t believe (s)he is this age already! Where does the time go?” Today being no exception – Findlay finishes school tomorrow lunchtime for the Summer holidays. How on earth is it that time already?! Two weeks ago he turned nine, and tomorrow he finishes Primary 4. He is more than halfway through his primary school experience and I simply don’t have the words to express how terrifying and wonderful I find it that my baby is growing up so quickly.

Findlay’s teacher at school this year has been an absolute godsend. Findlay’s Primary 3 experience was quite negative and I was extremely anxious about his future schooling but his teacher this year is experienced, kind and encouraging whilst managing to maintain a class of over 30 children. No mean feat! I haven’t ever done the end-of-year teacher gift before but this year I felt that I really needed to. But what to give? Long-term readers may remember my musings on handmade versus shopbought – I have always doubted my homemade gifts as being ‘sub-par’ in comparison to shop bought presents – but to be honest as we’ve had no income for 7 months I can’t justify spending money that we don’t have right now. So, handmade & homemade was the way forward.

With lots of teacher friends (like Kirsty) I’m well aware of things to avoid: bath products, chocolate etc are very thoughtful but my friend Fiona who is a teacher told me that one year she didn’t need to buy any bath products at all because she’d been gifted so many by her pupils. Mrs Lindsay has made such an impact on our family that I felt it only right to put some effort and thought into a gift for her and eventually came up with Smitten Kitchen’s Watermelon Lemonade. I trotted down to Ikea to collect some of their really nice Slom bottles, went into one of my favourite fruit shops in Pollokshields to grab a bag of lemons and a watermelon and set to work. Findlay came into the kitchen just as I was getting started and we had a pleasant time just chattering and squeezing the juice – time which I hold very dear, knowing full well that he is not going to be a child forever – so this really was the gift that kept giving.

In the recipe, Deb suggests swapping out some of the water with sodawater or sparking mineral water. Now I live in Scotland – a country blessed with the most pleasant-tasting clean fresh water in copious quantities – and the very concept of bottled water enrages me. The waste aspect of all that plastic really upsets my green thinking but recently we acquired this baby:

A sodastream! When I was a kid we had one and I remember it had three different sized bottles when we got it, all of which were subsequently lost in packed lunch boxes or under beds and so my Mum put it away. I loved the sodastream and was asking my Mum if she knew where it was recently when I discovered that they’re still being sold AND they actually look quite sleek and sexy these days too! With the amount of fizzy juice that we go through in a week, the sodastream pays for itself and I love the green credentials from using the concentrate instead of buying big 2l bottles. (Argos are selling the white one for £29.99 just now. The one we have is £49.99).

So anyway, I changed half of the water for sodastream-enhanced fizzy water and this is absolutely amazing. I made a bottle for Findlay’s teacher and a bottle for my pregnant sister who celebrates her birthday tomorrow.

Because I made so much, I’ve posted the quantities I used here and this made just over 1.5 litres.

8 fl oz freshly squeezed lemon juice (this was 4 lemons for me)
16 fl oz fresh watermelon puree, pushed through a sieve
Roughly 7 fl oz sugar syrup*
12 fl oz tap water
12 fl oz fizzy water

Mix it up and it’s good to go!
*sugar syrup – also called gomme – is easily made by mixing equal parts of sugar and water then heating until all the sugar has dissolved.

Posted under family, recipes

Iiiiit’s Saturday! That means it’s time for the third round of The Paddy Factor!

Today’s topic: Is handmade always better than shop-bought? Why?

Funnily enough, Emma was only the second person I ever gifted a handmade present to and I blogged it here at the time. I made her a pair of wristwarmers.

So why was Emma only the second person to receive something I’d made as a gift? Well, quite simply I didn’t believe that things I’d made were ‘real’ presents. I didn’t think my projects were of a high enough quality to gift and I worried that anyone receiving something I’d made would think that I’d copped out or worse, that I was too much of a cheapskate to spend money on them. The problem is that I spend January to November saving up so I can purchase random tat for the people in our life, just so that they have a gift to open.

Last year, I worked out that even if we bought only for our closest family and friends and allocated only £10 per person we were still going to be out £500 before we even looked at gifts for each other or the children as we have been blessed with a large family and superb network of buddies. Now tell me, friends. What can you buy for £10 these days? More to the point, what can you buy for £10 that has depth and meaning? That shows your giftee that you have considered their personality, hobbies and importance to you? Even more pressing was my concern that with a family of our size, £500 is a lot of money that really could be put to better use than increasing the dividends paid to the shareholders of the High Street. Every year I find myself running around the almost-bare shelves of High Street shops at 2pm on Christmas Eve almost crying with fear that I might not get something – anything – for somebody. Where is the meaning in that?

Reading about Charlotte‘s christmas hampers (flick back a page or two to see what she made) was a serious wake up call – handmade and homemade did not mean that less thought or effort had been put in. In fact it was the exact opposite! I read about how much effort she and her husband put into their Christmas gifts and realised how much I’d have loved to have received a gift with such effort put into it.

With the advent of online selling communities, it has become trendy to buy from artisans and crafters who produce on a small scale and for me this is still within the realms of handmade. I appreciate only too well how difficult it can be to find the time to craft as I can only do it when the older children are at school & nursery and Greer’s asleep, but by supporting these selling communities not only can you find more individual items – you are also ensuring that your chosen shop owner has an income. In my experience most of these shops are run by people like me – work-at-home parents or simply creative types who require a base to set themselves up.

The best gift I have ever been given came from my husband and I posted about it here. It’s a one-off, I couldn’t potter into the city and find 20 copies of the same thing staring back at me. It’s individual and more to the point, it was a very personal thing with meaning.

In short? I do believe that handmade is far superior to shop-bought, but I do still have lingering doubts that any gifts I make will be accepted in the spirit they’re proferred. In those cases, there’s always Etsy, Folksy, DaWanda, Coriandr, Misi and a host of other sites providing shop space for crafters and artists selling handmade lovelies that I’d be proud to gift. And which (to me) are a more ethical and thoughtful way to buy presents.

Posted under me