MIL buying too much stuff

[mum19801985]

Help!! My MIL is a compulsive spender and is constantly buying toys for my 3 year old son. Whenever she comes over to see him she brings bags of toys (a lot are from charity shops and some are new), we only have a small house and we are over-run with toys! My son has just had loads of new toys for Christmas and his birthday ( on boxing day). Since Christmas my MIL has bought my son 4 cuddly toys, one big truck, a playhouse and 3 jigsaws. I feel like this is making my son spoilt, whatever my son picks up in a shop she buys. I really want to say something but my husband is terrified of offending her (she's very sensitive) we rely on her for some of our childcare.

Both sets of grandparents are a bit like this with DD. Drives me mad.

I have to admit, I've given a lot of things away to charity shops.

Does she do the childcare at her house - could she keep them there?

You could tell her, in a general what you've been doing this week way, that as your DS has so many toys and you have so little space you're storing stuff and rotating what he has access to play with. You could ask her if she would like a box of the toys so he has different stuff to play with at her house. Then tip the stuff that's left or take it to a charity shop she doesn't visit.

Are you me? I had a thread about this problem recently! And DH is something of a hoarder so we hqve had to have a Big Discussion about it & I have set ground rules & bagged up quite a lot of stuff to go to charity shops/bin.

Be honest with them (if you feel you can), just say you are struggling for space & have recently had a big clear-out. Perhaps if they realise some of the things they are spending money on, are rapidly going to charity shop, they will stop doing it?

Have you tried asking her to buy certain things?? My mum shops for Britain but if she's going somewhere special we will talk about anything my son needs first.

I've hardly bought him any clothes in 3 years.

My MIL was this but got better. It was actually the amount of clothing she bought that was the problem. It was cheap, nasty stuff, wrong sizes and not what I would have picked. Dd1 is very fussy with clothing (I suspect she may have some sensory issues) and refused to wear what she was buying. We had to tell her at that point to stop wasting her money.

She always has to buy massive presents too. We asked if for Christmas she could get dd1 a set of books that she was really wanting. She didn't think that was 'big' enough so went for the default huge pile of plastic tat.