Christmas presents for a 2-year-old: Harder Than I Thought

I was just going to pilfer (with credit, of course) a photo from Flickr tagged with "Christmas presents" but since LauraC was kind enough to give me a tip on how to get the 'bokeh' effect in photos, I figured I should make an honest effort to try and get one of my own.

And I'm so glad I did, not because the photo is anything special, but because it was the first fun "me" thing I've done in what seemed like a day full of errands.   I played around with the aperture and shutter speed settings on my Canon S90, something I never do because I don't know where to start, used the new tripod for the first time ever, and learned a little tiny bit in the process.

Aaanyway, back to Christmas.  We are not Christian, but we celebrate Christmas enthusiastically.  Or more accurately, *I* love Christmas, and I drag TJ along.  Trillian is pretty enthusiastic about everything, so we're a good match. 

This morning T and I rode the bus downtown, mostly just so we could ride the bus, but we were on a bit of a Christmas scavenger hunt.  I told T she needed to look out for: snowflakes, a snowman, a Santa Claus, and a Christmas tree.   She found everything, and giggle with pure joy when she saw a (pretty sketchy-looking) guy on the street dressed as Santa looking to make money in exchange for photos.  I declined the opportunity, of course, but T was SO HAPPY to see him.

Christmas, like most things, is WAY better with a 2 year old.

I struggled with what to buy her this year.  She has SO MUCH STUFF.  We get a lot of hand me downs from friends, I have pretty specific ideas of good toys for her developmentally that I buy through the year, and she does better with less stuff.   She already has a play kitchen (big hit!) and a dollhouse (comes and goes) and all the little bits and pieces for those.

I finally settled on a tricycle, and found someone at work selling a used Kettler in great shape.  (Which is good because I really couldn't rationalize paying full price for it.)   But I realized she'd also need some smaller gifts, especially to fill her stocking. 

I've previously blogged about my toy pickiness.  It's only getting worse, as she gets to the age where the deluge of princess crap is about to start.  For the most part I seek out toys that are non-electronic, non-licensed character, not overly gendered, interactive and open-ended.  The talking Barbie laptop?  Not an option.

I started squirrelling things away in October, on the occasional kid-free trip to Target (heaven!), or just ordering online and unpacking boxes while T was asleep.  When I pulled everything out today to wrap it, I realized there was way too much when I also looked at the presents sent by our family.  So I kept some of the "3+" age group toys and art supplies for later.

Since she doesn't read my blog, I can tell you what I bought for her.

Alex Toys Learn to Dress Monkey - T has pretty good fine motor skills, but is just now learning how to take off her shoes and jacket herself. (good for me from an efficiency point of view, but it would be nice for her to do some things for herself...)  This monkey is *awesome* - he's got 11 different "activities" like a button, snap, buckle, shoes and socks, velcro, etc.  He's also super-cute, and she digs monkeys, so I think he'll be a hit.  Also, she was with me when I bought him...  (I know, Bad Mama, but the party store near us was having a HUGE sale on really nice toys.  I was lucky to get out with just one item.)

Moon Dough - It supposedly doesn't dry out when you leave it out, so I'd love to have something like her beloved Play-Doh that I don't have to vigilantly make sure is shut tight when she's done. It has bad reviews on Amazon, so I'm glad I got it super-cheap at Target. We'll see how it goes.

Crayola Washable Window Markers - a BRILLIANT suggestion from my friend Adrianne, who also has a 2 year old.  T can use these to draw on the sliding glass doors and they are totally washable from other surfaces.  I think she'll love it, and I do think she's got the control/understanding to use them only on the glass.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?-  T pretty much has this memorized since she hears it at "baby school", and I've never read it.  I think she'll like having a copy at home.

Crayola Washable Watercolors -  I wasn't sure she was old enough/ready for watercolor paint, but she tried some at her friend A's house and looooved it. Yes, my girl is totally into the artsy stuff.  These will probably end up will all the colors mixed up together, but both T and I are ok with that.

IKEA Duktig Soft Fake Food Breakfast Set - this was on sale for $4 the last time we were at IKEA so I grabbed it on impulse.  I took it out of the packaging today, and was pleased to find it's really well made, and super cute.  There are 4 pancakes with jam, a cutting board and knife (soft), bacon, fried eggs, sausages, and a sandwich that completely comes apart, with all the fixin's stuck together with velcro.  Maybe she'll feed us more than oatmeal for pretend breakfasts now!

IKEA Lillabo Train Set -  I had been meaning to buy her some train tracks and little trains since she was so taken with the train tables we saw at a couple of toy stores.  I'm not sure if I got her the 20 piece or 12 piece set, so we may not have enough track to do anything useful.  I guess we'll find out soon enough!

Trader Joe's Assorted Jellybeans - We don't give her much junk food, but as a result of her dairy allergy, she pretty much can't eat any candy at all.  So when I saw these jellybeans at Trader Joe's, I thought they'd make a nice stocking stuffer, and we can ration them out over time.  The box is super-cheerful, makes a nice sound when you shake it, and has pictures of all the flavors on the back, so at least she can learn something while she's rotting her teeth...

It's still a lot of stuff, and I know she'll be overwhelmed by it.  She's still young enough that she wants to play with each thing as she unwraps it, rather than amassing the "pile o' loot".  So we'll probably let her open a couple of things tomorrow on Christmas Eve, and then maybe spread out the present opening through the day on Christmas Day.
So, Interwebs, what are you all doing for Christmas?  Buy anything exciting for yourself or the kiddos?

Give it away, give it away, give it away now

I'm sure there's some more elegant way to cross-post between blogs, but I've written a new post in my 1000 Markets blog about my crafty charity project this weekend.

In other news, my fabulous husband cleaned out our hot tub this weekend so I could soak in it. It's got a temperature control so we've got it set low, because among the other 87,000 things you're not supposed to do when pregnant, sitting in a 101+ degree hot tub is another. They should issue some sort of handbook with a positive pregnancy test - "The HUGE List of Things You Can No Longer Do". Of course, maybe that's a consequence of having kids, too. Sigh.

I'm getting rounder and huger by the minute, but am looking forward to wearing my shiny new maternity clothes.

Must go pack up a couple more Anandi's Laboratory orders. One from Amazon.com (finally, yay!), one from 1000Markets, and one from Etsy. Yippee.

Cry me a river

I want to grow my tiny business of handmade shiny things. Not that I have illusions of pulling in a six-figure income with it, or ever outsourcing production and becoming a household name (like the woman that started the Spanx company, for example).

And speaking of which, how cool is it that Spanx come in maternity sizes too?! Hopefully that means I can still wear cute skirts and dresses for a while until I'm just too big to want to be compressed like that (which is probably at the same point I will retreat to sweatpants until it's all over, like when BabyX is 18. Just kidding, TJ.)

But I digress. Growing my business, right. I'd like to put my effort into becoming successful as an online seller. Because I dislike selling in person. I'm just not "sales-y". It makes me deeply uncomfortable. Now, in order to be really successful, I may have to change my attitude and try it again, but for now I'm focusing my efforts online. Because I can do other things while my items are hanging out waiting to be bought by that right person.

So my new experiment, for the next three months, is opening a shop on Amazon.com. No small feat, as it turns out. It costs a fairly hefty monthly fee, and also required some cash outlay on my part so that I could purchase UPC barcodes for each of my items. So I'm in it for some money. But you gotta spend money, to make money right? (That's what I tell myself, anyway.)

My last job at Mercent gave me a surprising education in the world of online retail. I never thought I'd *use* that info for myself. But having helped several customers get up and running on Amazon has given me a lot of great insight in getting my own shop going. Granted, I can't afford nifty automated data feed tools, and I enter my products in one by one, but the principles are the same.

Now is the hard part - waiting to see if I'm successful, and tweaking things as needed. I've only gotten a handful of products uploaded, and after a day of being "live" have no sales yet. I know I shouldn't expect much - it took me about a week on Etsy to get my first sale and they were few and far between for the first 6 months or so.

But for some reason I had these visions of orders just streaming in on Amazon. Hehe. My handmade pet tags are more expensive than most of the mass-produced ones currently listed on the site, so I suspect it's a special set of buyers I'm targeting. Now I just need to figure out how to reach them.

It's kind of nerve-wracking but also exciting. Wish me luck on this wild ride, and let me know if you have any good advice. I know I need to list more products, and work on getting the images into Amazon's format rather than the artsy Etsy format. And I *definitely* need to work on search terms, SEO, and all that. Would love any pointers to good articles/books on those subjects, for sure!

So I'm waiting for that elusive first sale to happen, so I can then begin to obsess about the second and third. But in the meantime, there's a lot of work I need to do over there.

Anandi's Laboratory on Amazon