Last fall I proposed the idea to pare down the presents we would buy for our daughter for Christmas and her 3rd birthday and put the money to better use. Honestly, the girl has plenty of toys and I don’t really consider clothes a present at that age – she’d be happy wearing nothing at all – so it was a pretty simple discussion. I bought her a doll crib and stroller for a total of $35 and she LOVED them. She got plenty of new toys, but she spent the rest of the day pushing her dolly around the house, then singing & rocking her to sleep. It was adorable and way less than the $150 I had originally planned to spend (on what, I don’t know).
Instead of buying more toys that would be played with for a week, we decided to put the money saved (and a little extra) into an outdoor play area. Of course we live in Connecticut, so it had to wait. But thanks to Pinterest, I could start planning and saving, and even ordering. You can check out my Outdoor Spaces Board, if you want. It’s a hodgepodge of adult and kid spaces that I can continue to add to as she grows and outgrows the space.
There were a few things I knew I wanted for sure, so I could purchase them immediately. Out of Christmas budget I bought an Intex Snapset Pool and EMSCO flexible fence from Wayfair.com. I didn’t want to have to drain the pool and refill it every couple of days – that wouldn’t be ecologically sound, it would not be good for our well, and it would be a huge pain in the butt – so I also picked up a bottle of Clorox to keep it clean.
Even with these extra purchases I still stayed under my original $150 budget for O’s gifts.
Here is the space before we started. It’s not much to look at. Work is under way and I’ll be posting periodically with updates.
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