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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

to think that my sister is BU and SIL did nothing wrong?

300 replies

MyFamilyAreAllMad · 25/05/2015 16:54

My sister and SIL are at war again Hmm

Sister gave my nieces £20 each. They are 7 and 8. They chose to go to Pizza Hut or Express or one of those places, so SIL and BIL took them and then got the girls to phone them up and say thank you.

Sister is now mad because 'they spent the money on themselves'!

Confused

I am staying WELL out of it, but I really think she's BU.

OP posts:
ToBeeOrNot · 27/05/2015 07:28

I'm more horrified at the thought that anyone pays full price in pizza express!

ToBeeOrNot · 27/05/2015 07:28

I'm more horrified at the thought that anyone pays full price in pizza express!

FitzgeraldProtagonist · 27/05/2015 07:43

DS2 loves Pizza Hut. He is big boy who loves the salad bar / ice cream factory. For his 3rd (yes 3rd Birthday) he wanted to use his birthday money to go to Pizza Hut with his brother. I let him and him choose some toys in Tesco with the remainder. Fact is - some people - children included - would rather spend on an experience than a THING. Even if that means shouting someone else to achieve it.

Fuckup · 27/05/2015 08:16

I'm so surprised that people are shocked by a child wanting to share their gift Confused what kind of selfish brats are you raising? I think its lovely that they want to share it, and why the hell shouldn't they? Its definitely a treat in this house to go out for tea, so if the kids want to do it and we're skint then they have every right to spend their birthday money on that, same as cinema, aquarium, or any other outing. In fact I'd be pleased that they would choose that rather than yet more toys. Your sis is def being unreasonable here.

SelfconfessedSpoonyFucker · 27/05/2015 08:27

When DS was ?? 7 ?? he was given a gift card to a local ice cream shop. He was very excited to be able to take his daddy there because they had coffee and he knew daddy liked coffee. He and dad went and DS was very proud to buy them both a treat. It was a lovely present. He wrote a nice card saying how he used the gift certificate. I don't see why it is cheeky if DNs were excited to do the same.

bigbumtheory · 27/05/2015 08:33

Unless the parents have form for using money given to the kids then I don't understand why your sister is so upset. If it was recurrent behavior to use kids money for this then I'd understand her annoyance.

I used to get annoyed when my friend ate most of the easter eggs brought for her son.it was greedy and upset him. In contrast my other friends son offered his eggs around to share, that was just sweet.

OnIlkleyMoorBahTwat · 27/05/2015 08:49

I'm more horrified at the thought that anyone pays full price in pizza express!

DP and I often joke that a good definition of having more money than sense is paying full price in a chain restaurant like Pizza Express. However, a lot of the voucher deals are not valid on Fridays/Saturdays so the people in there then must be paying full price.

We don't know if they actually went to PE and we don't know if they used vouchers or paid full price but still, the sister is BU to be unhappy in how her gift was used. Being able to go a restaurant and have 3 courses and choose what you want and not the 'meal deal' or the cheapest things on a menu is an unaffordable luxury to many so they will remember the experience well for that reason alone.

TTWK · 27/05/2015 08:50

Wherever you are on this spectrum, the reality is that a 3 course meal out for a family of 4 is likely to cost well over £50 perhaps closer to £100 if they didn't have the cheapest things on the menu and, shock horror, had a drink as well.

Rubbish. You can spend fortunes on eating out if you wish but there are a myriad of deals out there. Pizza Express have an ongoing 4/1 deal on Tesco points. So £10 of Tesco points buys you £40 of Pizza Express vouchers.

Explore Groupon and suchlike and you can have great meals out for much less than that. I recently got a deal on a Burrito bar in Covent Garden (an expensive place to eat), where 4 of us had a huge meal, 3 courses, and a beer each (sons are late teens), for £8 a head.

MrsWooster · 27/05/2015 08:54

if my kids chose to treat me and dp or their gp's or anyone else, rather than buying even more toys, I would be proud of them.

ovenchips · 27/05/2015 08:55

I don't think we can say if your DSis is being unreasonable or not. You'd need to know the full history to know if it was reasonable for the gift money to be spent in this way or not.

But bearing in mind the adage that you can't change other people's behaviour, only your response to it, your sister has a choice in the future. She can give something that can't be used to benefit her nieces' parents, if that is her problem with the original gift of money. That way she can't get upset in the timeframe between giving the gift and the gift being used.

But she must also see that once you've given a gift (of whatever description) you've lost your voting rights on it.

TTWK · 27/05/2015 09:33

But she must also see that once you've given a gift (of whatever description) you've lost your voting rights on it.

That's not true. If you give a gift, you are entitled to be annoyed if you feel it's been misused. If I give my nieces money I would be unhappy if it got spent on their parents. Fortunately, that would never happen in my family.

Fuckup · 27/05/2015 09:34

yeah great ttwk if you can afford to shop in tesco to get the points in the first place. Eating out is still a treat to most people weather you pay from your own wallet or use vouchers, ergo its understandable that kids might want to spend their birthday treat money on this. Really can't understand why the sister is bothered by this at all. its beyond my empathetic understanding.

ovenchips · 27/05/2015 09:36

TTWK You don't think it's true. I do.

bigbumtheory · 27/05/2015 09:42

I do think you can be annoyed about what a gift of money is spent on. I was very pissed off when someone chose to let a voucher for a massage at their favorite place expire. I saved for that and they admitted bring too lazy to book. This year they got nothing.

ovenchips · 27/05/2015 09:51

Bigbumtheory. You can't control people though. It was their choice (a poor one admittedly) not to use your gift.

I think you are totally right not to buy it for them again though.

As I said, you can't change others' behaviour, only how you react to it.

OnIlkleyMoorBahTwat · 27/05/2015 10:04

Explore Groupon and suchlike and you can have great meals out for much less than that. I recently got a deal on a Burrito bar in Covent Garden (an expensive place to eat), where 4 of us had a huge meal, 3 courses, and a beer each (sons are late teens), for £8 a head.

But I don't want to be scratching about for deals or going at 4 pm on a Tuesday, or hoping that I can actually redeem the voucher and not find that the restaurant is mysteriously 'booked up' in order to get a good deal or even just pay a fair price.

I want to be able to walk into a restaurant and not feel that I've been ripped off if I don't have a voucher to take the cost down to something like a reasonable price.

I had a lovely 2 course Italian Meal at an independant restaurant not so long ago where they did 2 courses from a restricted menu for a tenner and also sold bottles of house wine for £10, which is much more reasonable than what they normally charge. The portions were not as big as what you often get, but were more than enough as most restaurant portions are often far too large anyway.

That looks like a fair deal for both the customer and the restaurant with no need to bother with vouchers and deals.

Your £8 3 course meal with a beer is not typical and the restaurant probably made a loss at that price so was likely to have been a very limited offer and they would be relying on repeat business and other customers paying more to subsidise it.

TTWK · 27/05/2015 10:05

As I said, you can't change others' behaviour, only how you react to it.

Ovenchips, your response above proves my point. Sister can't change the behaviour of her brother and sil, but she is fully entitled to react angrily to how the money was spent.

People are fully entitled to be pleased or angry about how a gift they give is used.

00100001 · 27/05/2015 10:13

TTWK - you're right, you can be annoyed that the money wasn't spent the way you intended it, but, only if you didn't make your intentions clear.

For example, if you said to Child A (I'm calling her Annie) something like this: "Annie, this is £20 is for you to buy a toy with." and then Annie go ahead buys £20 of chocolate, fair enough, I'd be upset too. (But not overly so.)

But, if I said "Annie, This £20 is for you to spend on whatever you like." I don't think it's reasonable to then get upset about how she chooses to spend that money.

Also, I feel that if it's that much of a problem about how gifts of money are spent, then personally, I wouldn't give Annie the money on its own. I would possibly say something like "Annie, Let's go to the toy shop and get a present for you, you can spend up to £20" or "Here's a £20 Toy Shop Voucher"

However, if we go to the Toy Shop with the money/voucher and Annie then choose to spend some of that money/voucher on a toy for another person (let's say, her best friend Bobby), I still wouldn't get upset. I might suggest that we buy a gift for Bobby as well, and Annie can still have a £20 gift. But if Annie said she still wanted to use that original £20 to buy Bobby a gift, and use the rest on her. I still couldn't get upset about it.

00100001 · 27/05/2015 10:17

and again If Annie chose to spend the £20 I gave her( that I explicitly said was for a new toy) on a chocolate for herself and other people, because she said "Oh, I don't need toys, but I thought it might be nice to get my class some chocolate."

Then, the most I would expect is for her to ask 'permission' before spending it on the chocolate. Asking if I minded? (But then I wouldn't actually expect that)

TTWK · 27/05/2015 10:22

TTWK - you're right, you can be annoyed that the money wasn't spent the way you intended it, but, only if you didn't make your intentions clear.

Fair point, but when I give money to nephews/nieces, which I do often, it has never occurred to me to stipulate that it mustn't be used to pay for parents food. No has it occurred to me to say don't spend it on drugs or porno mags. I kind of trust that ain't gonna happen anyway.

00100001 · 27/05/2015 10:37

I wouldn't expect any 'reasonable' person under normal circumstances to say "Here's money, you can't spend it on x, y or z" :)

PurpleCrazyHorse · 27/05/2015 11:00

If you give cash, then you give cash and you can't really dictate how it's spent. If you want them to buy something specific, then buy it yourself and wrap it, or buy a gift voucher for a specific shop.

We've given cash to our god-daughter and I wouldn't worry how she spent it, sometimes I've bought her a Claire's Accessories voucher as I know she'll enjoy buying the sparkly tat in there Grin

Maybe next time, your SIL just shouldn't bother getting the kids to say thank you with specifics and simply send a generic thank you card. Your sister will be none the wiser.

We have no idea what was decided amongst the family regarding the meal. Parents could have let the kids pay for themselves as they couldn't afford a meal for 4 usually, or the kids could have bought a starter & dessert for themselves as a treat, with the parents picking up the rest, maybe the £40 covered the whole bill and they couldn't have afforded it otherwise.... who knows?

ovenchips · 27/05/2015 11:00

TTWK That's twice now you've quoted my opinion back at me. And to suggest that I am proving your point with my argument is wrong. I am arguing probably the actual opposite to you. We obviously don't agree on this but that's allowed!

I think a gift is, well, a gift and as soon as it is given it belongs to the recipient. If they choose to treasure it or chuck it is their choice. I do not think I am perfectly entitled to be angry or upset about how they choose to use it.

If what they do bothers me, I would change my behaviour for next time. As an example, I wouldn't give cash as a present again if it bothered me how they spent it.

As I said there is not enough detail in this thread to say if OP's DSis is BU or not. It sort of depends if nieces wanted to spend their money on that whole meal or if parents made that decision for them. If it was totally the nieces' choice then that's fine.

And as I suggested in earlier post, if it bothers DSis that the parents inadvertently benefitted, then next time don't give a gift where that is possible.

Notso · 27/05/2015 11:07

I wouldn't let my kids pay for a pizza for me and DH. Something small like a chocolate bar yes not a whole meal.
DS1 at age 7 offered to buy me a piece of art I loved with his own money. He had saved for 18 months to buy the lego Death Star but offered to spend all £300 of it on me. According to some posters I was rude to refuse his gift.

NKfell · 27/05/2015 11:16

TTWK I absolutely wouldn't have minded my DS spending money I'd given him on something for his Dad- I'd have thought it was very sweet!

When DS bought me the flowers he told everyone, neighbours, friends, family, teachers- he was very proud of himself and when anyone gives him money as a gift- he can spend it on whatever he wants (within reason!). As I said, I actually paid him back very discreetly but I wouldn't have wanted him to know that.

I personally feel that saying to a child that they shouldn't spend money they've been given on anyone else might not be sending the best message. My DS gets enormous pride (and the biggest smile you've ever seen) when he does things for others.