I can't stop thinking about what happened at Christmas and getting slightly angry each time.
My niece's are both in their 20's now, my brother and I have a big age gap.
When my nieces were young I always bought them birthday and christmas presents, now that they are older I still spend around £25-£30 each at christmas. My two children are 5 and 1. My brother earns a lot of money but his wife sets him a tight budget on what he can spend on presents for each person on each side of their family.
When we exchanged gifts my sister in law and brother had spent around £12 each on both my children. When they opened their gifts it was obvious my budget was far more generous.
My sil obviously felt awkward, and started apologising to my children that she had not spent more, and proceeded to ask my 5 year old if she would have perferred more gifts or a different more expensive gift? I thought that this was a bit of a silly and inappropriate thing to say to any child.
As if that wasn't bad enough she then proceeded to tell my 5 year old that she had infact bought her more toys, but she was going to take them back to the shop, but she could perhaps have them anyway.
Anyway this is not out of character for my sil and she does tend to say outlandish and inappropriate things quite a bit.
None of us responded to this and I was hoping she would move on from the subject because it was frankly embarrassing.
She then sent me an extremely long message the next day as to what she should do about the extra presents she bought but did not give to my children?
I haven't responded, because I just feel that where children are involved this is in very poor taste. You either give a present or you don't, and fail to see the purpose of her very odd behaviour.
Has anyone else faced a similar situation and how did you handle it?