Eco-friendly birthdays for 5 year olds

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Well strictly speaking still 4 year olds. These birthdays are weighty matters for parents. The kids are young enough to enjoy maximum anticipation of the event and are not too hard too please, yet, but the memories are gilt-edged and we want to get it right. Faced with various requests for random and themed gifts over the last few months (Barbie – too blonde, Bratz – too bratty, High School Musical – too old) plus bikes, rollerskates and cuttings from an educational catalogue at school, the parental plea – what do you want? seems at once both superfluous and increasingly desperate.

So the day comes when you have to commit to a purchase. Their has been some form of brief parental summit on the subject which went along the lines of: do we really need to buy another bike when there are five in the house and garden already…

So I am not in a bike shop. I am in a succession of shops that have a small offer of toys, following heavily the trends mentioned already (Barbie, Bratz etc.). It strikes me we are remiss and crap parents. We KNOW she wanted a DS and she’s not getting one. We forgot to discuss the item and related capital expenditure at the summit. Could I make a unilateral budgetary decision right now? Does a 5 year old need a DS, much less do I need two grumpy children talking to electronic gadgets incessantly, clutching slim “pens” just begging to disappear down the floorboards? I forget the DS – review position at Christmas.

The trouble with looking at most toys, when you have completed over a decade of parenthood (ok some of those years have run concurrently), is that when you are faced with shelves of the lovelies in a shop your mind plays tricks on you. I stare vacantly at pretty Barbies in sparkly dresses with accessories. I see them a few months hence – naked, unwashed, matted hair, the dog gnawing on a limb. I’ll be shouting “Save the Barbie from the dog”, but the kids don’t care. That’s the fate of dolls in our house. So no to dolls. Then there’s the array of stuff that needs batteries in all their manifestations: AA, AAA, A, C, D (whatever) and of course you always have the wrong ones for the gadget which always creates birthday tantrums of Krakatoan proportions. I don’t take long to reject battery toys. Jigsaws and anything else with small bits? Forget it. If I buy those I may as well just empty them out on the floor when I get home and hoover them straight up the Henry’s nostril. Save myself a bit of wrapping paper and cut out the middle man.

So what should be a pleasurable experience, choosing my child’s birthday gift, becomes a traumatic experience where my mind is tortured by broken toys with lost bits and the nightmare is inhabited by my own uncaring and selfish 21st century offspring.

Back to the present. Nothing won’t do. Something is better than nothing, even if it is an evil Barbie.

So obviously I opt for a Barbie book (with colouring and stickers in my defence). I am in contact with the other parent now. He updates me. He has bought a kite (for a 5 year old, so he won’t be able for flying that then will he?) and I beg in muted tones that he also buys the Bratz bike saddle cover and the streamers for the handlebars of the old bike that is being “madeover”… I only have 5 minutes remaining to organise this shindig now and the hopes and dreams of a soon to be 5 year old rest on my shoulders. Then I see it. The gift. A eco-radio that you wind up and can charge your mobile phone (Samsung, Nokia, Sony Ericcson & Motorola) with when you are out of reach of electricity. Perfect.

Not a toy - obviously

http://www.ecotronictoys.com/04-eco-penquin.html
for information on how not to be caught in the dark without your Penguin Eco Torch.

This is part one of how I meet, or otherwise, my daughter’s stringent birthday project management brief. Part 2 to follow this weekend on the occasion of the carefully themed “Birthday Party”.

If I was 5 again I would like this:

Hell, I could live there now!

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Tags: Birthdays, Parenting