Don’t Buy Stuff for My Kids

Okay, everyone, I get it: You want to let my kids know that you love/like/tolerate them, and since it’s Christmas/it’s Easter/it’s Halloween/it’s their birthday/you haven’t seen them in a while/you just won the lottery, you figured you’d buy them a gift.

…And this gift takes on the form of a tangible item. And not a disposable tangible item, like a bag of M&Ms or a bottle of bubbles…no, a permanent, tangible item.

Let me tell you the story of the big ball.

Back in March of 2008, my wife, my son, and I were invited to a mini-party at a local arcade along with some relatives. One family member kindly bought Owen a large bouncy ball. Very large. Like, 18 inches in diameter. This was very kind of her, especially since she hadn’t seen Owen in months, and she knew he liked balls.

But guess what?

Exactly one week later, we were moving out of our house and into an apartment and, unbeknownst to my kindly relative, I had been frantically trying to get rid of stuff in anticipation of moving somewhere with no yard, no garage, and half the square footage. It’s true: I had sold our desk. I sold our dining room table. I gave my brother-in-law several tools. I took a trunkload of clothes to the goodwill. And I even planned to get rid of one large shelf by simply leaving it in the house on the day we exited for the last time. So I told my wife, essentially, that while I appreciated the gesture of the new ball, it simply wasn’t welcome in our new residence. As it took up over one square foot of floor space, I didn’t see how we’d have room for it in our <900 square foot apartment.

So Owen owned that ball for about five days.

And I still feel bad about it.

I’m sentimental. I’m a pack rat. I loathe discarding anything that has any value. And yet, I want to leave a light carbon footprint. Despite having three kids, and a cat, I honestly don’t want a five bedroom house on five acres with a built-in pool and three-car garage that some Americans clearly think is necessary.

So, please, don’t add to the stuff we have in our cozy, charming (“cozy” and “charming” are nice ways of saying “a little smaller than is ideal”) home.

Let me tell you some stuff about our kids…

Owen owns board games that he has never played. He and Isla both have coloring books that they’ve never touched. And they have so many crayons that I could take one away from them every day for a year…and at the end of the year they’d still have more crayons than they could use.

Isla has so many pieces of sidewalk chalk that when she leaves them outside, I don’t put them away. I let them get rained on until they are reduced to a pile of crusty ashes that get washed away by the rain.

Isla also has a lot of dolls. Not as in one-doll-for-every-crayon lot of dolls, but still, a lot of dolls. And I feel like every new doll diminishes the specialness of her existing dolls. When she only had two or three, that was cute – like those were her dolls and she’d keep them through the years. But now there are so many…I don’t even know where they all came from, and with each one, she simply plays with the others that much less.

And while I’m a big fan of books, I’ve repeatedly had to remove duplicates and undesirable texts from their shelves. When Owen was a wee tot, he had three shelves, each about a foot wide, filled with books. Now he has five such shelves. His sister has a 2-foot wide shelf in her room, and in the play room, there are three more feet of book shelves.

The kids have so many dress-up clothes that the bin we keep them in is bulging at the seems. We keep a suitcase of additional dress-up clothes out on our porch. The porch, meanwhile, has become a tertiary closet for their spare toys, and I barely have enough room to step into the porch to retrieve the mail.

And here’s the biggest problem: While Owen doesn’t need any more toys, Isla and Emmett most assuredly don’t need any more toys because they are already receiving the hand-me-downs from their older sibling(s). And don’t tell me that they need their own stuff, because I can assure you that Isla has no qualms – doesn’t even think twice – about playing with toys that were once the sole property of her older brother. Emmett, meanwhile, appears to show no disdain for rattles that were not just removed from their blister packaging within the last day.

Here, maybe some images will help drive the point home. Oh, and before you look at any of these, keep in mind that none of these photos are from their bedrooms, the garage, the yard, the attic, or the aforementioned porch (all of which house copious toys):

Let’s start in the basement. Here are two bins – each two feet in diameter – that are filled with toys. There’s just no place else to put these toys.

But if I zoom out a little, you can see the bins themselves are insufficient for our surplus-storage area. Look: There’s a box filled with more toys. And a rocking horse. And a bag filled with some Star Wars toy Owen played with for about 10 days. And a foosball table. Yeah, I know, it’s completely shocking that we don’t have another place in the house to store a toy that takes up 6-freakin’-square feet of space…but there you have it. I won’t even show you the large robots, push-cart, or sit-n-spin thing that also take up too much room down in the basement. Just trust me…they’re there.

Here’s a toy bin in the kids’ toy room. What’s that, you say? You can’t see the bin? Oh, it’s there – see it? – on the bottom, under an avalanche of toys. The mountain of toys here is so high, that it nearly blocks the mirror hanging on the wall that the kids are supposed to be able to look into when putting on dress-up clothes. When I’ve asked Isla what we should do about it, she suggested raising the mirror.

This dining room cabinet is home to our kids’ art supplies.

…Except, if I back up just a little, you’ll see the supplies have now spilled over into the adjacent cabinet.

And here is their DVD cabinet. There are a lot of great movies on this shelf (and Frozen is on there, too), but it’s overflowing. There used to be just two stacks, but now there are four. Those DVDs on the bottom are precariously sitting on the very edge; they often fall when we open the cabinet. Oh – and this isn’t all the DVDs, there’s also a three-ring binder with pages of more DVDs.

And not to be outdone by his older siblings, here’s Emmett’s basket of toys. Notice the basket is filled to overflow; there are even baby toys sitting next to the basket.

…in fact, it’s overflowing so much, that we have to store some of his toys in a drawer in the dining room. This photo shows the drawer open only about halfway, as it is so full the toys block the drawer from opening any farther.

So what to do about all this? Part of me just wants to tell people to just buy my kids experiences (like tickets to a museum) or clothes, but if my kids are anything like me (and I think they are), then I’m sure when they receive tickets to a museum or clothes, they probably just think, “great, this is something my parents would get me anyway.” And they’re right: if no one buys my kids socks, I’ll definitely be sure to buy some for them. And I know that part of the fun of giving kids gifts is seeing their reaction, so buying an experience just leads to delayed reactions. And buying them nothing offers no reaction at all.

So, no, I don’t have a solution. I’m just here drowning in stuff.