Tuesday, June 25, 2013

No Flynn, Its Not Christmas


  • Its that time of year again - toy sale time! I will freely admit that i love the annual toy sales from the big department stores : anything that saves me money on Christmas gifts, makes it easy for me to hide said gifts ( just leave them on layby until the day you want to wrap them! ) and, thus, makes Christmas that bit less stressful is a winner with me. I even enjoy browsing through the catalogues multiple times and picking out what gifts the children in my life might like. What i dont like is trying to get Flynn to understand that he isnt getting those gifts for a long while yet.


     All the parents out there will feel my pain - trying to explain to a very small person that yes, it IS a Christmas catalogue but NO it isnt Christmas is very, very frusturating. At 3.5 years old Flynn is old enough to want to trawl his way through the catalogues, marvelling at all the cool new toys, and very helpfully directing me to the pages which contain something he would like ( for the record.... that means EVERY PAGE ). However, he isnt quite old enough to wrap his head around the idea that things on sale so you can save money for a time of year that is still months away.  Everyday for a week i've been asked:
    " But Mum - is it going to be Christmas tomorrow ?"
    " No Flynn, Christmas is still a long time away "
    " But Mum, Aunty Pippy already bought me some toys. Do i get them tomorrow? "
    " No Flynn, those presents are for Christmas "
    " But Mum - is it going to be Christmas tomorrow ? "

    ....Cue eye roll and tearing out of hair. I have started explaining to him that there are 7 birthdays in our family before its Christmas time, so he'll just have to wait til all the birthdays are over and done with before he can even think about getting any gifts for himself. I plan on hitting up the Big W toy sale the day after it starts, so once my shopping and lay-bying has been done the already dog-earred Big W catalogue may have to go mysteriously missing...

    Are you a Toy Sale-r? Do you lay by or pay outright and then hide the gifts from little prying eyes? Has your husband also picked himself out a gift from the 'toy' catalogue, like an adult sized child?

3 comments:

  1. I have four 1st birthdays this year (2 friends and my 2 nieces) so jumped at the opportunity to get toys on sale!

    I didn't even attempt a Christmas shop, as I think they can have something smaller for Christmas with their 1st birthday being quite big.

    All four for $100 woohoo! Love Target :)

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  2. Unfortunately I find these days that my kids seem to change their minds about what they like in the 6 months leading up to Christmas. I got caught out a few years ago when I bought gifts for Ollie and by the time Christmas came he didn't really love what I had bought, and really wanted something else. As Christmas is the entire of year I like to spoil my kids I hated that he wasn't getting what he really wanted so ended up getting it anyway.

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  3. Last year was my first experience with the toy sale and I loved it. with Punky's birthday being a month out from Christmas it meant that I could lay by both her Christmas and birthday presents and pay them off over the 5 months which worked so well.

    This year we also hit up the sale for birthday and Christmas presents but we ended up buying most of the stuff outright as the lay by line was huuuuuge and we were only getting a few small things for each of the girls anyway. I am however going back this week to lay by a swing set as that will be their big joint Christmas present (not that PJ#2 will have any idea but hey

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