HANDY HINTS PAGE 2
Keep a list of the presents you buy for children each year, how old they are and how well they like them. In years to come you can look at the list and get ideas for presents for other children in the same age group without racking your brain or wandering around shops for hours trying to find something that they might like.
The best present for a mother with young children is time (to herself that is). One year when we were on a very tight budget, for a close friend's birthday (she has 4 children very close in age), I gave her a card with 12 hand made babysitting vouchers in it, valid for 12 months. Some were for shopping, some for an evening and a night, and some just for a couple of hours to herself. She said they were the best present she'd ever received, and she used all of them!
Here's an idea for those rainy days when you have young children stuck inside. Hire a new movie or one the children haven't seen in a while, invite in a couple of the children's friends at a specified time, make some movie tickets with the name of the movie on it, get some play money out or make you own (you'll need 3x$1 'notes' per child) pop enough popcorn to fill a medium size plastic cup for each child, fill a cup with ice and lemonade for each child, then make a choc-top icecream cone for each child and put them in the freezer. Put the drinks and cups of popcorn on a table near the 'movie room'. If you don't have a seperate tv room stretch a piece of rope across the room where the tv is and peg some sheets to it. When the friends arrive give each child a movie ticket and '$3' each. Escort them to the 'movie room', and let them buy their drinks and popcorn ($1 per item). Tear off the end of the ticket just as they would in the movie theatre and let them enter. Have all the blinds or curtains closed, turn out the lights, turn on the tv and video and start the movie. Pause the movie about half way through so the children can go out and buy the choc-top cones. Have a good time!
If you boil your kettle quite a few times a day, in the morning fill a couple of thermos flasks up. You'll have a ready supply of boiling water when you want a cuppa, without waiting for the kettle to boil and you'll be saving energy as well.
Whenever your children make you a card or write you a letter, write the date and childs age on the back and put it away in a shoe box kept for that purpose. They're wonderful to take out and read a few years down the track and they bring back all sorts of wonderful memories.
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