Gifts

I love giving gifts. This is not to say I am good at gift giving. I have given several duds and spearheaded some huge group-gift flops.

Two of my favorite people to give gifts to are my nephews. The younger one is trickier. He is still really young and we all joke that all he really wants for a gift is a hug. (That’s probably not too inaccurate.) The older nephew is five-years-old. He’s full of energy and spunk and has all of the independent spirit that accompanies being the oldest child. I consider it a personal challenge to give him gifts that get him excited. A while back I gave him leftover change from different trips. The handful of large coins probably amounted the equivalent of 50 cents. But to him, it was priceless. For his birthday, Wonder Boy and I got him a wallet and put some bills from past trips in it. Maybe it was more like $1.50 this time? When he opened it one of his friends yelled out, “Colored money!” (I bet that kid gets super excited when his parents play Monopoly.)

Being an aunt has lots of perks and I still think it’s super cute every time I’m called Aunt Kate. But one of my favorite parts is giving awesome gifts.

I think this stems from having an awesome Godmother. Mine still gets me a gift every birthday and Christmas and I’m in my 30s! Two of my favorite gifts have been from my godmother, Fish. When I was maybe 7 or 8 she got me a camera. It was the real deal and came in a camera bag. I can guarentee you I took some terrible photos with it but had a great time doing it. A few years later Fish outdid herself by getting me a crimping iron. But this was no ordinary crimper. It didn’t put boring crimps into your hair. It put stars and hearts in it. Practically speaking, this was crazy because hair moves to much to keep shapes as specific as start and hearts. But at the age of 10, I thought this was phenomenol.

The crimper below is not the one I had when I was younger. I doubt I would have thought it was nearly so chic if it’d had Powerpuff Girls on it.