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Spoiled Infant

I like to think of myself as the Mack Daddy of merriment when it comes to Christmas – the Super Bowl of all holidays. I don’t wanna brag, but I know my way around the bottom of a tree. However, this year my wife is challenging my gift-giving abilities with a disagreement over the amount of gifts that are appropriate for an infant.

Nicole and I made our way down to the basement the other night to sort our way through the bags and bags of holiday gifts that we had been gathering over the past couple of months. We were elf-deep in presents that would soon be wrapped and slid under the tree just waiting to bring a little materialistic holiday joy to our family members.

As we started sorting through the gifts for our two kiddos, my wife noticed that we had way more presents for our 4-year-old son Reid than we did for our new little candy cane, Lyla, who, let me remind you, is only 7 months old. Nicole pulled out her little gingerbread man-covered notepad that she’s been keeping track of gifts on and made a little scribble that said we needed to go shopping for additional items for Lyla.

Then came the lecture that we needed to keep things equal. We didn’t want to show favoritism and we needed to make sure Reid observed Lyla getting the same avalanche of gifts that he was getting.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa baby, I exclaimed. Pump those breaks honey child – do we really need to make things equal this year?” I personally don’t think we need to go out and heat up those credit cards any more than we already have. Our adorable little blob (and I mean that in the most sincere way) doesn’t really know what’s going on. Lyla would be just as happy with a shoe box filled with tissue paper this year. Or here’s a great idea, let’s just wrap up some of the toys she already has and give them to her! She’ll never know the diff. Let’s be honest, we’ll probably be spending more time pulling wrapping paper out of her mouth this Christmas than playing with new baby toys.

I hope I’m not sounding like a big ol’ Scrooge here, but I’m not fully convinced that spending a ton of money on a 7-month-old for Christmas is very practical. We presented this topic on the morning show and a flood of listener calls came in and they fully agreed with me! Ha ha!  Although yes, we do need to show our son Reid the joy of giving and that we love Lyla just as much as him, I see no reason why we can’t spend $10 on a box of Gerber baby food, wrap it up and slide it over to her Christmas morning. It would be a nice, practical gift from us that we’ll use anyway, and Ho Ho Ho she gets a nice new, state-of-the-art box to play with! We’ll score a couple of great Christmas morning photos of her enjoying her strained peas and sweet potatoes and we won’t be breaking the bank doing so.

Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like a couple of ounces of delicious prunes and a nice, full diaper.


Featured in Colorado Parent Magazine December 2015