We have now had three kid birthdays during the Covid-19 pandemic/lockdown. We normally do family parties, and my parents have been living elsewhere during this half of the year for a number of years now, so the birthdays themselves felt fairly normal except that the older two kids were home (normally they’d have been at college), and we didn’t get pizza for dinner. The biggest difference was that I had to think way further ahead. For example, the ingredients for the chosen birthday dinner/cake: ideally I wanted to acquire as many of them as possible on the grocery shopping trip BEFORE The Last Grocery Shopping Trip Before the Birthday, just in case the store was out of something on my first attempt and I needed a second chance. (And I cautioned the kids ahead of time that it was possible they wouldn’t be able to have their first choice of dinner/cake—but happily I was able to find all the ingredients and/or make do with easy substitutes.) And then I had to label that stuff so no one in my household would eat it.
But also, the gift shopping. Shipping delays, and unpredictable shipping times, meant I had to think further ahead. And I haven’t been shopping in my usual stores, and one of my usual gift-buying techniques is to notice things in stores and think “Oh, I’ll bet they would like that!” I have also been known to wrap the pile of presents, realize it’s too small or something is missing, and go out the day before (or the day OF) a birthday to get one more thing—and that isn’t feasible right now. (My plan if that had happened was to write an I.O.U. and wrap it.) And finally, I have been trying to dramatically reduce how much I buy from Amazon, though that proved to be more challenging when some of my usual alternatives were unavailable, or too overwhelming to figure out right now.
All of these things together meant I had to start thinking about it a lot earlier and do a lot more careful planning. In case you have some medium/older-kid birthdays coming up in the next couple of months, here were some of the things I bought for my kids turning 13 and 15:
(image from Amazon.com)
• Wireless bluetooth headphones. I have four people in my household who like over-the-ear headphones, and we have tried a few different kinds and these are hands-down the favorites. (The people in my household who prefer the in-the-ear kind favor these.) They do eventually break (especially when people keep DROPPING THEM and/or YANKING OUT THE CHARGING CORDS), and then I buy another set of the same ones. They come in a bunch of colors, and each person has their own color so we don’t get them mixed up. It drives me a little batty to have to get the attention of family members who are wearing headphones/earbuds; but on the other hand, during lockdown togetherness, widespread headphone usage is probably doing a lot of the heavy lifting of keeping us all civil.
(image from Amazon.com)
• Jewelry box. Elizabeth needed one, and I had no luck finding something that seemed right: everything looked dated, or else too old or too young for her, or else didn’t have any compartments big enough for her giant hoop earrings. This box was a compromise: it’s not quite right, but it’ll hold MOST of her jewelry, and the cat on the top looks like her cat, whom she often refers to as a lovely gentleman. When I can shop in stores again, I will attempt to find an upgrade to give on a future gift-giving occasion.
(image from Amazon.com)
• Cat stroller. I don’t know if this will ever arrive. I ordered it the first week of May, and it has not yet shipped but still says it’s supposed to arrive by tomorrow night. Well, we’ll see. This was originally going to be a gift for Elizabeth, but it became clear it wasn’t going to get here in time for her birthday, so now it is going to be a Pandemic Family Gift and we’ll have it when we have it. When I ordered it, it was not available in pink, or else I definitely would have ordered it in pink; I ordered it in navy blue plaid, which is now in turn no longer available.
(image from Amazon.com)
• Whimsical purse. Before the pandemic, Elizabeth was starting to routinely meet friends in coffee shops and doughnut shops and so forth, and she needed a way to carry a phone plus money plus a couple other little things. Classically, this is solved by POCKETS (rare in women’s clothing, as we know) or a PURSE. But she squinched her nose at standard purse options. I got her this one, hoping it would hit the right note of “I am carrying a purse but NOT REALLY.” We will see if she is still at that stage of life when she is allowed to go to coffee shops again.
(image from claires.com)
• Assorted stuff from Claires.com. Faux fur scrunchie. Giant organza scrunchie. Big heart-shaped hoop earrings. Little polka-dot scrunchie. Wave ring. A cute snake ring I NEVER would have thought to choose for her, except she saw it while we were browsing the site together (both of us pretending it was just for fun and not because her birthday was coming up) and exclaimed what a cute little snake friend he was.
(image from Target.com)
• Terry Pratchett books. Henry has been on a Terry Pratchett kick. We own a fair number of them, and he was almost done reading them, so we bought him two we didn’t have yet: Monstrous Regiment and Equal Rites. (We are certain we used to own a copy of Equal Rites, but we can’t find it anywhere. It’s probably tucked into the bottom of a still-packed box of wall art or something.)
(image from Target.com)
• No Thank You Evil game. Henry had seen a bunch of good stuff about this game online and really wanted it. It looked surprisingly expensive to me, and also maybe too young for him, and our family does not really PLAY board games much—but it was one of the very few items on his list, and the name felt Appropriate For Our Times, so I bought it.
(image from Amazon.com)
• Phone tripod with remote. For those doing art projects and/or making TikToks.
(image from Topataco.com)
• Meow Meow Meow shirt. Edward likes this kind of thing. I ordered it really early, and it came in plenty of time. (The link takes you to the “Pay attention to me” version, but the pull-down menu for Title offers the “Meow meow meow” version.)
(image from Target.com)
• Some Very Interesting Cats Perhaps You Weren’t Aware Of. Ordered within perhaps fifteen minutes of seeing the title. Silly cat books are very popular at our house.
(image from Target.com)
• Take It Away, Tommy. We are all fans of the Breaking Cat News cats.
(image from Target.com)
• Candy. One year, when William was a younger teenager and was so apathetic about his birthday that I was in despair about what to get him and was all but choosing random things off the shelves at Target (sleeping bag! Minecraft periodic table!), I added a bag of candy—just to give him SOMETHING to open that I KNEW he would like. It generated SO MUCH ENVY among his siblings, it’s been a recurring idea for other birthdays. In a pandemic, when they can’t go with me to the store to get themselves candy with their allowance, it has achieved even higher levels of success.
I think you might enjoy Monstrous Regiment :) And that snake ring’s so pretttty!
Re the cat stroller – I ordered a summer sleeping bag for my toddler from Amazon and for weeks the little box said ‘your item is on its way’, but nothing happened. Eventually I got fed up of waiting as the weather’s getting warmer where we live and I really needed to get him a lighter bag NOW. So I requested a refund (can’t remember the exact steps but there was a button; it was pretty easy) and as soon as I’d done that the little info box changed to ‘your item has been lost’. The one I ordered to replace it arrived the next day. So. It might be worth investigating to make sure the stroller hasn’t somehow vanished into the ether and nobody has bothered to tell you.
I love Monstrous Regiment!
I notice the teen girls I know are very emphatically Anti-Purse, which is weird because imo they have way more shit to carry than we ever did at their age. They’d rather tuck their phone into the waistband of their pants which would quickly drive me insane, especially in a Texas summer, but whattya do.
I do not know if this is what is going on, but when *I* was a teen girl, lo those many, many centuries (or was it millennia?) ago, in some groups a purse was coded/interpreted as “high maintenance” and “girly-girl” – a definitely regular purse was coded as “preppy rich girl” or “hasn’t gotten the memo that grownups are not cool and still wants to be a regular grownup” depending on the purse and its quality. This affected 1. girl-girl friend teasing, 2. masculine attention or, rather, lack thereof.
The answer in my generation and approximate subcultures: quirky, definitely vintage bags – either “this is definitely a ridiculous purse” with beading and whatnot, or “this is maybe not a purse?” bags; crocheted or sewn homemade crossbody pockets, basically; mini-backpacks; and backpacks. That yellow bag would totally have worked as a not-a-purse purse at the time! (but man: looking back on it, being a teenage girl is *complicated* and *hard* not like I didn’t already know that but *yikes*)
My younger daughter turned 16 during lockdown (end of April) and I got her 2 KPop T-shirts from Redbubble.com (she’s a massive fan of Korean pop music, but that site has many, many styles of T-shirt, plus cute and cheap stickers, home déco, stationery… it’s probably her favourite website), a couple of Pura Vida bracelets (actually, I bought four and kept two for myself, giving her the option to exchange with mine if I hadn’t picked the right two for her, though I had as it turned out) and her first “real” perfume – massively expensive (though bought on discount thankfully), Lancôme’s Idole, and she was thrilled to bits with that. The cake/dinner thing wasn’t much of a problem as food shopping has been back to normal since about 2 weeks after lockdown started (so by, say, early April all was fine), plus I live about a 2 minute walk from a shop so going out isn’t a problem for me (I mean, it doesn’t involve cars or whatever. I can be out and back in less than 15 minutes).
Thanks for the list – my kids are in the same age range and I love to see ideas! The candy thing is so spot on! I stopped buying fruit snacks years ago, not because of health/sugar reasons, but because my kids fought over them – who got more, who ate the last one, until I couldn’t take it any more. Then one year my son got an early birthday present and I wanted him to have something to open on his birthday so I wrapped an assortment of fruit snacks. All the kids were insanely jealous, and so a new tradition was born! Everyone gets fruit snacks on their birthday. They choose whether or not to share with their siblings. I swear they look forward to it more than the real gift!
I bought each kid a box of character fruit snacks for Xmas this past year, Disney princesses for one, Toy Story for the other, and while my husband thought I was nuts for WRAPPING them, they were Extremely Popular too. They were in a box, they were easy to wrap! and unexpected!
Equal Rites is my very favorite Pratchett! So, so good.
PS Wasn’t there some nefariousness with Paul and the shelving of the books after your move? So, it could literally be *anywhere.*
Also, yes any kind of bag was incredibly uncool when I was a teenager. We couldn’t even have a pencil case. We would walk to school carrying a huge stack of ring binders and textbooks and some pens balanced on top. So absurd in hindsight but seemed completely obvious it was the right thing to do at the time!
That pet stroller is the best! Such a deal! My ten year old daughter has begged for one and I should have caved in a long time ago. Perhaps now is the time. It will give purpose to our walks and maybe jazz up the cat’s life a bit.
Monstrous Regiment and Equal Rites are among the very best Pratchett’s. I read Monstrous Regiment when I need a shot of confidence about misogynistic nonsense, which means I have read it a great many times.
How is it going weaning yourself off Amazon? I’m struggling. :(
If it makes you feel better, I thought about it and realized my household just wasn’t up to it. I buy locally if I can safely do so. Otherwise, it’s generally back to Amazon.
For things we can’t find easily locally, we use Target.com, which has almost everything we need, ships super fast, and is often cheaper than Amazon. I’m sure there are moral drawbacks to them too, but probably less horrible overall. For books: https://www.indiebound.org/ is a collection of independent bookstores that ship – I’ve had excellent success so far. We find a lot of kids’ stuff secondhand on Craigslist/local parenting forums. We’re by no means purists, but this has worked for us.
It helped me HUGELY that in the first few weeks / couple months of the lockdown, Amazon’s site was almost useless: items unavailable, or driven to wild highs by 3rd party sellers, and/or with shipping estimates a full month in the future. This led me to start using Target.com MUCH more than I ever had in the past: I’d ordered from there only a few times before lockdown; now I place at least one order per week. They had the non-perishable things my grocery store didn’t have: soup! rice! pasta! beans! And they had the stuff I usually bought at Target in person—even hand soap and facial tissues, when my grocery store had none! And they had free shipping within the week, sometimes in only a couple of days! It was heady stuff, and helped ease the withdrawal/transition symptoms.
As you can see from this post, I do still order from Amazon if something isn’t available from Target or another site I like, or if the price difference is considerable (I’m willing to pay a little more to get it from not-Amazon, but only to a certain point). But looking at my order history is interesting: it’s steady, frequent ordering from Amazon until March, and then an abrupt change to only very sporadic ordering, almost entire birthday-related. So I’m making progress, and in the process I’m gradually finding other options—such as the already-mentioned Target, and also like when I found I could order my piercing-care spray directly from the manufacturer for less than I was paying to get it from Amazon.
For me the key was to not try to quit Amazon cold-turkey, or prohibit all Amazon ordering, but instead to have a philosophy of “Try other places first.” If I try a couple of other options and they don’t make sense, I do go ahead and order from Amazon. And when the pandemic is over, I hope to explore even more alternative local options.
Yes! This is exactly how I’m shifting and it is very effective. I’m also finding myself more willing to pay higher prices and wait for longer shipping times after the…pandemic training, if you will.
I have two pairs of those headphones! We synched one to our AppleTV so one person can watch tv without annoying the other/waking the baby. It’s been amazing.
I have had a love-hate relationship with Amazon for years and have wanted to quit them several times. (Except for Kindle, Kindle is my life.) At the beginning of the pandemic I decided it was now or never but it’s not working out. Grocery stores close by either insist I phone in my order (aaaaargh)
or ring my doorbell and wait, even when I have asked them to just leave at the doorstep.
As orders from smaller vendors, out of 8-10 orders I have made for mask making supplies only one has been delivered. The rest never came but I was refunded my money. And then there is the rogue vendor who won’t answer my emails. I’ve been waiting since mid-April.
I truly want to buy only from smallish US vendors but I don’t need all this aggravation. I don’t want to spend my “golden years” resolving shipping issues. And even after my city’s stores open, going shopping in person is not an option except for the rare ocassion when I feel comfortable asking my son to drive me. I don’t want to spend the few hours we have together every other Sunday going from store to store.
Any suggestions for reliable e-ordering are appreciated. I would prefer small businesses.
For masks specifically, I had a great experience with this etsy seller: https://www.etsy.com/listing/778393966/face-mask-dust-mask-family-protection. If you order on Sundays it’s buy 2 get 1 free!
In general I like etsy for many gift & decor type items, but I’m having a hard time quitting Amazon when i need, say, my preferred brand of sunscreen for the babies, and a replacement floor mat for the kitchen, and replacement tiki torch fluid…. and i can get all of that easily in one place.
You can filter eBay by sellers in North America (or the US) – usually the shipping times are quick (and they’re usually accurate about how long it’s going to take to get your item in the mail). Just stick with 98% positive-or-better and you should be fine. With North America-filtered eBay I’ve had exactly one failure/problem – they sent me the wrong item – and it was resolved quickly. eBay international is a whole different ball of wax, though, especially with shipping disruptions due to the pandemic… but even before then, things were… variable. Oy.
Sometimes there’s a local quilting/whatever store who will do delivery. I’ve been relying on Joann a lot for fabric (with their layered coupons and sales and whatnot, if you’re making masks to donate, it’s a lot cheaper); a local friend has been doing the curbside pickup for me – you can designate an Alternate Pickup Person, and it works well – I don’t know if you have anyone willing to do that sort of errand, but if so, it’s a pretty easy errand that is fairly difficult to mess up. They also do delivery, but at a cost. I also have a deep soft spot for Hancock’s of Paducah, a large small business which mostly does quilting fabric and it is just *fabulous* and also ships and is accurate and great, but for fabric for mask donation… yeah, I’ll go with the $3/yard sale Joann’s fabric instead of the (gorgeous!) $6/yard Hancock’s of Paducah fabric, sigh.
Joann’s has THE WORLD’S WORST WEBSITE, though, IMHO.
For pick-up-in-store YES it is TERRIBLE. Given that on each item page, they show you whether it is in stock or not at your local store, *how hard could it be* to allow you to filter the fabrics (or anything – but the fabrics is where there are thousands of total results with, hidden among them, dozens of results that you can buy) by whether you can, in fact, buy them or not at your local store?
For buy-online, eh, I’ve met worse. It’s bad, but there’s worse out there. (except for buttons; I don’t know why they are so incompetent at buttons.)
Wowsers, that Meow Meow Meow shirt is purrfect for my beloved. He just finished rewatching Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, both of which feature the MGM logo signoff. I’m not sure I’ve ever pulled the trigger that fast! Thanks so much, Swistle! And the jewelry box is just adorable!
I had a ten year old birthday last month, and the best new gift I gave her was a gift card. She’d never had one before! I did amazon because I was thinking books, and she ended up ordering a book and a toy. This has of course opened up the wide world of online shopping (which I guess I never did with my kids?) so now she scrolls around the internet finding things she wants to buy, and then earning money to get there.
It has also inspired discussions about supply and demand, and price changes, and things in/out of stock. We have also discussed buying from personal and smaller businesses online, instead of amazon. It’s been fun! So if anyone else has birthday around that age, I highly recommend gift cards!
For those not in your house, have you discovered Pinatagrams?
My kiddo turned 13 at the very beginning of the pandemic, when it wasn’t on my radar to organize friends/family for a parade or a zoom whatever, so we celebrated just the two of us, pretty quietly. I haz regrets.
BUT this year’s gifts were all about her room, and the things she liked most were a set of smart plugs so she can control her lamps/electronics from her phone, and a strip of those color changing LED lights with the cute tiny remote. And more (forever more) throw blankets.
Love these ideas and may steal them! Well, except for the throw blankets, which are multiplying like tribbles in our house already.
That jewelry box is adorbs. And the cat stroller… I don’t know if it’s the same one, but there is a lady in my neighborhood who walks her small DOG in one of those, multiple times a week. They both seem to enjoy it.
This is very specific but I have to share my triumph: I have been STALKING the Ring Fit Adventure for the Nintendo Switch for a couple of months because it was the only thing my then-about-to-be-12-year-old wanted for his birthday. And it turned out that there’s a worldwide shortage because the factory was shut down in China due to the pandemic. So I’ve been keeping windows open with all the usual suspects and refreshing periodically throughout the day. I’ve been haunting sites with boards dedicated to getting this game. And finally, finally I noticed that one small local branch of a chain had it listed as “low inventory” instead of “out of stock”… I called and they looked and there was one that someone had put on hold and then not picked up and his hold had just expired. They put my name on it and I went down and nabbed that bad boy! Woo hoo! I even gave the guy who’d put it aside for me a $20 bill and said to get a round of coffee for the 5 employees who were there that day, I was that grateful I could stop my hunt! His birthday is over, but it’s now going to be a present for graduating from elementary school next week.
Oh that is VERY EXCITING
This reminds me that if anyone is doing a lot of ordering from target, you can get a target red card DEBIT card. We try not to use credit cards, but since this is a debit card, it just comes right out of your account. There is a 5% discount on everything, and there’s supposed to be free 2-day shipping (it’s not 2-day for me right now, but that’s ok.) just a thought for anyone who’s looking for ways to save a little $$.
Re: Target. There now is an option to consolidate shipping (it says may delay your order a day or so). I did it, got $1.00 credit. Despite that, hey still shipped my order (10 items) in about 5 different boxes (UGH). But they all showed up within the desired time frame. What’s bugging me is that most of the stuff that I really need (wipes, lysol, etc. ) you can only pick up in store. I don’t understand this – they can limit the amount you order (like they do with the hand sanitzer). The whole point of ordering online is to AVOID going into the store, so this seems particularly stupid. Am I missing something?
I don’t understand it, either. It feels like they’re saying, “Hm, unless you’re willing to engage in behavior that is riskier for yourself as well as for our employees, you can’t have the risk-lowering products!”
Exactly. And also there is no guarantee that if you DO risk going inside that they will HAVE what you just risked everyone’s life for.