Birthday on a Budget

My sister throws unique birthday parties. Theme parties. For example, her son is really into Indiana Jones, so she made a cake shaped like a hat and created satchels and whips for all the guests. We cannot compare with her and her themes.

My cousin makes really high-quality birthday cakes. Museum-caliber works of art. The cakes are so good that she's gone into business. We cannot compete with my cousin and her cake-making.

My sister-in-law likes to host big parties. She booked the church and served up dinner for a large number of guests for her daughter's first birthday. It was not on the scale of a wedding reception, but it was a far cry larger than any party we've ever thrown. We cannot match my sister-in-law on matters of scale (but we did steal her balloons).

We know our limits, but we also know our strengths:
We excel in the deal department.

For Scotty's 2nd birthday, we got him piles and piles of loot for a low, low price after several months of careful acquisitions (we also took him swimming for 75% off).


1. Little Tikes Vacuum Cleaner (Kijiji): He has a little popper that he likes to push around the house whenever the vacuum comes out, so got him his own little vacuum, complete with dustbuster. I have a standing query in Kijiji.ca for anything made by Little Tikes, so we picked this up from a lady 5 minutes from our house.


2. Thomas the Tank Engine train rack with Lights and Sound Percy (Kijiji): Another Kijiji subscription tells me about all the Thomas gear that comes up for sale. A lady in a neighbouring community sold us this rack for Scotty's trains and cars for less than half of the retail price, plus we got this Percy engine that makes a a chugging sound when you roll it along. Two Replacement batteries would be $4 each at the store, but I got 10 of them for $1.75 on ebay.


3. Toy Garbage Truck (Chapters/Airmiles): We get Airmiles from shopping at Safeway, but rather than endure the frustration of trying to book flights with them, we traded some in for gift cards at Chapters. Since Chapters has recently started selling toys, we were able to order this toy garbage truck -- Scotty loves to watch the garbage truck come by our house. His pronunciation of 'garbage truck' sounds a lot like 'Scotty truck'. He took this toy to bed every night for 2 weeks after his birthday.


4. Knapford Covered Bridge for Thomas the Tank Engine set (Chapters/Airmiles): We bought his bridge with gift cards as well. Chapters has a train set kids can play with, and Scotty has always loved the bridge. We loved that it didn't cost us anything.


5. Tricycle (Kijiji): A friend down the street tipped us off to a Kijiji ad for this brand-new tricycle that someone was selling. I didn't have exact change, so instead of a loonie, the lady who sold it to me gave me a toy dog with a big gold chain that sings hip hop music if you squeeze his paw. I don't care much for the dog, but the tricycle was a good buy.


6. Unofficial Chuggington t-shirt (CafePress.com credits): Scotty's favourite show for a while now has been Chuggington -- the British animated program about three young locomotive 'trainees' who are learning how to pull mail cars and passenger cars, etc. We have nearly every episode ever made recorded on our PVR. The show seems pretty new and the merchandising efforts have not made their way to Canada yet, so I had a shirt made up on CafePress.com, where I had $14 of credit from the sale of my Settlers of Catan design. Free custom shirt!


7. Thomas the Tank Engine musical couch (Kijiji): The piece de resistance was this couch, which I bought back in January from a lady in Edgemont. It has buttons to play the theme song and toot a whistle, as well as a throttle that turns some plastic wheels with appropriate sound effects (no, the wheels do not make the couch move). You can fold the side down for couch mode or velcro it upright for serious train-driving.

Those are the presents that we got him, but he also scored some sweet loot from his Grandparents, including a huge plastic road/rail set of Polish manufacture (Wader Toys) and the Disney/Pixar move "Cars", which he watches several times each week (he calls it 'car show').

The anticipation of holding these toys for so long made the big day that much sweeter. Time to start acquiring items for Christmas. I've already picked up a few items on ebay...