Money, Love, and Change

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As you may know from some previous posts, we have a $250 self-imposed budget for Christmas this year.  We had a budget left of $227, and I have definitely made a dent in it.  Here’s the breakdown:

$41 – the Christmas shopping for all of our little friends.  We have three little ones that are like family to us, and I combined this with two birthday gifts for kids (the total order was $69) to get free shipping.  All of the gifts are made from sustainable wood and are earth-friendly.  I had budgeted $15/kid for Christmas, so I came under budget by a few bucks.  But now I am sad since all the fun gifts have been purchased!

$2 – stocking stuffer for our kid.  This was an impulse purchase at the craft store – I got him 2 sticker books with stickers.

$20 – gift certificate for the stepfather.  We get him the same thing every year.  Whatever.

$46 – Crap from Bath and Body Works.  They kept giving me coupons for $13 in free stuff when I spent $10.  I am not a big fan of this store, but my sister loves it.  With the coupons, I took care of my sister, her boyfriend, my sister-in-law, and our niece.  Each of them is getting basically $20 – $22 worth of stuff for $10-$12.  I am glad that I found this deal because all of the people mentioned above are hard to shop for.

$23 – a clearance truck for the kid from Little Tikes.  The box is damaged, and the batteries may need to be replaced (I can handle that!).  This is one of those really big trucks that he can push around and play with in the yard.  We like the fact that Little Tikes toys are made in the USA, and this truck got great reviews for being durable.

This leaves us with $95.  We expect to spend $25 on my brother (we’re going in on a video game with my grandmother), $25 on my sister-in-law (gift card), and $20 for my sister-in-law’s boyfriend.  That will leave us with $35 for the tree, and nothing else for the kid.  I’m not sure that this is going to work, as we would like to get a couple more things for the kid; I want to at least spend a little money on yarn so that I can make him some more stuff.

I’ll have to show the numbers to the husband so that we can make a decision.  I am thinking that another $50 might be reasonable, but I don’t want to go overboard.  Any thoughts?

I was talking to my mom the other day, and she had mentioned how she had no idea what to get my brother for Christmas.  My brother has Down’s Syndrome, and spends a lot of his free time playing music and video games.  He also loves wrestling.

I was asking if there were any new video games that he might like, and she couldn’t think of any, but mentioned that she was thinking of picking up a Wii for him, since she was at her local Walmart the day before and they looked “kind of cool.”

I had never thought of a Wii for my brother for Christmas, only because I didn’t expect there to be any available.  I expressed to my mom how that would be a great gift, since he would have to get up and move around to play the games (he participates in Special Olympics, but has a fairly sedentary job and doesn’t do much when there aren’t Special Olympic practices taking place).

I added that there was a pretty good chance that there weren’t any more available, since she had seen them at the store the day before.  I promised that I would try to hunt one down for her if she wanted me to, and that was the end of the conversation.

Yesterday, she told me that she was able to pick up a Wii for my brother!  I was really excited for him, since I think that he will like it a lot.  Then she said, “I got one for you guys for Christmas too, if you want it.”  She went on to say that she could return it to the store, but that she wanted to get us something fun this year, since “you guys always want practical things and that’s so boring!”

I am not sure what I was more shocked by – the fact that my mom dropped some major cash on a Wii for us, or that she had just called us boring.

So here’s the question: Should we accept?  I’ve wanted a Wii for awhile, but never really considered getting one until they went down in price.  I would really love to get a Wii fit to try to learn some yoga.  I think that we would have fun as a family playing together, and if I had to choose a video game system for my son when he gets older, this would be the one.

On the other hand, it’s not practical at all!  I had mentioned that a gift card to Lowe’s would be a nice gift, since we need to replace the fixtures in our bathroom.  I’m guessing that this falls into the category of boring to my mom…

So if you were me, what would you do?

This is not a political blog, so the purpose here is not to reveal who my preferred candidate is, and why the other candidate sucks, etc. I just wanted to give you this heads up, so that you may be more inclined to read on.

This weekend, we went to visit some friends, and took some time to walk around Washington DC since the weather was so nice.  As the kid was attempting to scale the Washington Monument, I was looking around and saw the White House from a distance.  As I turned back around to check on the kid, he was laughing happily with a couple other kids from a different country as they all tried to scale the wall.

It just kind of struck me that regardless of who we all go in and vote for on Tuesday, people aren’t really all that different.  Perhaps it is because this is the first election where I have a child myself (and therefore am more aware of the daily political news), but I feel that this is an election where so much hatred, ugliness, and division has bubbled to the surface.  Sometimes it is easy to forget how lucky we are to have the right to walk around our nation’s capital freely, and talk about how much we love (or despise) a candidate, and be able to vote.

I guess that I found myself to be a bit surprised to become humbled when visiting our nation’s capital, instead of being more fired up for Tuesday.  I also can’t wait to take my son back to Washington DC when he is old enough to start learning the significance of the monument he was trying to scale…