Presents that are more hassle than fun

[Bex5490]

Now before everyone jumps at me for how grateful I should be to anyone who buys my child gifts…I know this. I always send the thank you videos of DS gleefully opening said gifts and I’m more than grateful for the love and sentiment behind them. However…

Today I spent my one day off work trying to simplify a science experiment made for an 8 year olds for my 4 year old son! There is now rainbow food colouring on my carpets and a grumpy DS who is sulking because he wasn’t allowed to rub the chemicals on his face 😂

Over the years I’ve had a professional painting kit, a huge blackboard easel meant for a classroom and a second hand trampoline with no garden!

What were your (if any) most inconvenient gifts?

Unexpected pets
Vouchers for places that have very limited availability/are difficult to get to
Something you won't use and has been personalised so you can't try to return it or sell on or re-gift.

😂 I don't have kids but this did make me giggle.

When I'm buying for children I always try and make sure it's age appropriate and actually I usually check with the parents as to whether my idea is a good one. I think that's the way to go!

The year DH forgot to get back to his parents when they asked ideas for the DC (he has form), so on Christmas morning they both opened slim kits. To be fair to MIL, DH definitely deserved that.

Those gift in a box things are a bit rubbish. Eg 2 nights in a luxury hotel. When you start looking through most of them have a surcharge or are only available monday-thurs and the ones that are available are in the back of beyond. Instead of being a nice gift it becomes a chore trying to just use up the voucher so the gift giver hasn't wasted their money. 💰

Experience gifts for DS. My mum loves to get them for him and his cousins with the idea that they all do them at the same time. Lovely idea but it's always a pain the arse to find a date that everyone can do, especially as they tend to be "first Saturday of the month, but not during term time" type deals.

I’m going to start being more honest with the people around me about the purpose of toys and activity sets in my house…

Toys should prevent my beautiful child from wanting to talk to me or make eye contact.

The better the toy, the longer the silence!

Although TBF my Nan one year bought charity gifts in all of our names so on Christmas we all got to open a letter saying something along the lines of ‘You have bought a donkey for a child in insert third world country….

No hassle for parents but as 6 year olds we were pretty unimpressed 😂😂

Small amount of money vouchers for very expensive shops! Cost me a fortune 😩😩😂😂

My favourite was an Easter egg hunt kit, handed over by MIL in front of the kids.

Basically: "Here Shoes, you run around putting up chick bunting, posting signs & hiding eggs in the freezing cold garden while we all watch out the window.
I'll receive thanks for my brilliant gift when you've tidied up."

I should have refused but the kids would have been sad ☹️

😂😂😂😂😂😂 Best one so far…what an F you of a present!

Hamma beads for a toddler.

Vouchers that cover 1/3 of the cost of an expensive hotel, so the present is basically “hey! I know what you could do with £300!”

Flowers. They are pretty, but the hassle of cutting the stems, finding a vase, remembering to change the slimy water, taking out the ones that die early….i just cba.

For kids, I hate those sets with a billion pop out pieces in plastic grids than you (not the dc) spend hours putting together, following some ridiculously badly explained diagrams which are supposed to be solar powered robots/helicopters/cars etc etc.
The dc don’t have the patience, they kill the planet and THEY DON’T WORK

SIL has form for this. Bought DD a Build a Bear voucher, it’s 70 miles to the nearest store for us. So it involved a full day out, lunch, parking. Voucher didn’t even cover the cost of the shitty quality teddy. Probably cost us £100.

Niece is also much older than DD so she would buy DD craft kids her 10 year old liked, when DD was 4. DD would usually get upset with them and they’d be a waste of time.

Any play doh sets that involve a machine to make tiny play doh 'sprinkles'. No. Just no.

Yeah, pretty much any playdoh thing that involves sticking intricate tiny little decorations on another thing!

Pompom kits. Endlessly threading the wool round a ring of cardboard because my 5yo "couldn't do it" after 1 minute.

We came back from holiday one year and a relative had bought my kids a two storey mansion play house and put it up in our back garden as a “surprise” Christmas Gift. It was massive compared to our postage stamp sized garden. I couldn’t use my washing line for three years as it no longer fitted.

I was also going to say experience vouchers. The Buyagift kind. Hours spent on the phone to the company trying to arrange to spend the voucher, which is usually restricted in dates or locations, with a surcharge that means it would have been cheaper just to pay for the damn thing myself without a voucher.

Vouchers for one child to do an activity which meant we had to pay for the other child, myself and DP to it too. One activity was out of our budget so the voucher never got spent.

Restaurant vouchers where the nearest venue was an hours drive from us.

A Nerf gun where I spent an entire afternoon fishing bullets out of impossible to reach places and from behind heavy furniture before hiding it and telling DC I have no idea "where they put it".

Gift cards for small amounts for shops that don't have a branch anywhere near us. This means you have to pay postage yourself or out of the voucher so DC have less to spend.

Anything that involves making any kind of mess - paint your own and Kinetic Sand.

Tower Bridge is infamous in our family.

It was one of those wooden construction kits. DDs were given two... a Princess castle and Tower Bridge. Both marked 6+, which was fine because they were 7&8 at the time. The Princess Castle was a doodle.

Tower Bridge however... it was a nightmare. After 2hrs we were still on step 15 of about 100. We were all traumatised. We never had the energy to attempt any more...

It is our most talked about Lockdown memory.

What's a slim kit?

Vouchers are a hassle , cash much is much easier to showing

I forgot about Build a Bear - That was a 45 minute drive each way for us, the voucher only covered the bear so we spent another £50.00 on accessories for 2 DC and then we went for lunch before going home!

Hot wheels. You think it will be great having cars whizzing round the tracks, but the tracks you've built keep collapsing and even when they don't the cars fly off them.