Tag Archives: family

Ten tips to make gift-giving more memorable (without a trip to the mall)

24 Nov Gift

Hi there! In anticipation of Black Friday tomorrow, I’m taking fifteen minutes to share some gift-giving strategies that will help you avoid the chaos that is the mall. Here are ten tips:

KIDS

Build a library—No matter what their age, consider giving kids your favorite books from childhood.

Instead of toys, buy children experiences. (Happily, these toys are donations.)

For younger kids, the beautifully illustrated Caldecott medal winners are always a good choice—avoid bland books that feel more like flash cards than stories. Parents will thank you for helping them avoid reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear for the 347th time.

Create an experience—Buy an admission to a water park or play area (and join them in the experience, too!). One of my friends took her tween niece and nephew geocacheing, which was a huge hit. For a bigger gift, buy a family membership to the zoo or children’s museum, which they can enjoy all year.

Connect to their interests—For teens, special interest magazines are a great choice (teen magazines focusing on sports and art), as are sports equipment, sleeping bags for camping and sleepovers, summer events such as a music day camp, adventures like horseback riding, and age-appropriate event tickets.

ADULTS

Think local—support a local restaurant by giving a gift certificate or choose a gift from a local boutique. Tickets to an event (“Taste of ___” or a music festival) or a subscription to a performing arts group are also great choices. If the adults have kids, offer to babysit so they can go out and enjoy their gift!

Think consumable—whether you offer homemade goodies, gourmet ingredients, local wine or spirits, adults can appreciate an indulgence that won’t end up in a landfill or donate-to-charity pile. I love giving Penzey’s spices to help friends replace old and dusty spices lingering in their cabinets. Penzey’s cinnamon alone will blow your mind.

Think charitable—consider what matters to the recipient, and choose a charitable gift that supports the cause they’re passionate about. This might spawn a more charitably minded family tradition.

WEDDINGS

Wrap smart—Sometimes a card can get separated from a gift, and the happy couple will feel quite embarrassed about sending a broadcast message to their wedding guests asking, “Hey, who gave us this toaster?” Avoid any confusion by sticking the card inside the gift box (or taping it to the gift box) before wrapping with paper.

Celebrate the future—Consider giving the couple something they can enjoy for the long-term, such as bottles of wine to be cellared until their first, fifth or tenth anniversaries.

Send it—Don’t bring your gift directly to the wedding or reception site because it can be a huge task to gather and transport these gifts home. Instead, send it to the couple’s address before or after the wedding (but not immediately after the wedding, as they might be away on their honeymoon and can’t collect a package from the front porch).

YOUR SPOUSE

Finally, for your spouse or significant other, I think the best gifts are those that create more time and memories together. Buying a limo tour for wine tasting, a weekend stay at a cozy, romantic hotel or a class you can take together creates memories that will last far longer than this coming holiday season.

So, enjoy each other and celebrate the best thing about the holidays—special time with friends and family.

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Because we’re “the sharing family,” that’s why

15 Nov 11.15 Water symphony

What are the rules that guide your life?

Today, “don’t hit your sister” and “don’t sass” were featured in my household. Ah, parenthood.  

I’m not one for issuing a lot of don’ts. In fact, if you know me at all, you’ll agree I’m not a rules-follower. I never follow a recipe to the letter (not even my own). Policies make my eyes glaze over. So you can imagine I wanted to take a bit more creative approach to rules for my family.

To guide our kids into becoming the adolescents and (gulp) grown-ups my husband and I intend, I felt like the rules needed to be relevant to all of us—kids and grown-ups alike. Here’s what we started with:

How we treat others: Share. Encourage. Be truthful. Be gentle. Keep your promises. Forgive. Love each other.

How we behave: Whatever you are, be a good one. Enjoy moments. Look. Listen. Create. Start. Keep going! Finish. Make the most of it. Be safe, but have an adventure.

How we treat our home: Ask first. Clean it up. Put it back. Care.

(By the way, if you are as awesome as my friend Katherine, you should definitely include one of her family’s rules on your list: #10. Rock and Roll!)

Inspired by the beautiful typography on Pinterest, I came up with this little graphic for our home. It’s still a work in progress. Design majors, don’t laugh. But it makes sense of all of the little lessons I’m trying to teach my little people, every day.

My son Drew has constant questions about why we do things, and I realized that being matter-of-fact was startlingly effective. It’s more subtle than “because I’m Mommy, and I said so.”

Instead, I say, “because we’re a ____ family.”

It started with the phrase “We’re a sharing family.” My CEO’s wife wrote an anecdote for a special book I assembled for his tenth anniversary with my company that struck a chord: She described how he has always been passionate about sharing and giving. From a very early age, their children were taught that they were part of a sharing family, and that they would share their means and their time with people less fortunate.

The story totally resonated with me. I decided immediately that we, the Tretheways, are a sharing family. I tell this to Drew over and over. It’s starting to stick.

Last March, on his third birthday, we weren’t allowed to bring homemade cupcakes to share with the class (and I won’t be caught dead buying cupcakes stuffed with unpronounceable, non-food ingredients from the supermarket). So, instead, we brought the one food item Drew loves more than anything: fruit leather.

Seriously. They’re my kid’s candy bars.

We brought them to school, and I told Drew he could start passing them out to his friends. He hesitated. (I mean, come on—we’re talking about a just-turned three-year-old giving away his favorite thing.) Then he went over to each of the dozen kids in his class and handed them a piece of fruit leather. “We’re a sharing family, so you can have one,” he said, seriously.

I was bowled over. It was working! Drew has even convinced me to share stuff I did not intend to share with him (um, no thank you for backwash in my root beer) because he’d remind me that we were a sharing family. And so, I shared.

I soon realized I could leverage for a few more salient points. And so, we are also a clean family. We take baths. We brush our teeth. We clean up our toys. We don’t waste.

We're a sharing family. Here, Drew shares his find: a tiny crab.

This summer, when we were at the county fair, Drew spilled some caramel corn on the floor and then picked up and ate the fallen pieces faster than I could intervene. “Drew, if you spill again, would you please just throw the popcorn away?” I asked him.

“Because we’re a clean family?” he asked. I was going to say because the floor probably had all kinds of germs growing in that accumulated funk, but I stopped myself. “Yes, because we’re a clean family, and we make sure not to leave our messes behind.”

“Here, Mommy,” he said, and offered me the bag of caramel corn. “And we’re a sharing family, too, right?”

Once I’d scooped my jaw off the floor, I literally stopped us among a stream of fair-goers, got on my knee and hugged that platinum-blond boy as hard as I could. “Yes.”

Uh-oh … I’ve gotten carried away telling the story and went longer than fifteen minutes. Sorry. It’ll happen again, I’m sure (I’m not a rules-follower). In the meantime, why not take fifteen minutes to consider what your rules for living are. And if I were to describe you and your family by one word, what would it be?

“We’re a ____ family,” you would say.

And I’d say, “Nice to meet you. We’re the Tretheways. We’re a sharing family.”

P.S. I’ll leave you with this little quote: “What I love most about my home is who I share it with.”

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Is what you are now what you really want to be?

3 Nov Is what you are now what you really want to be? Painting by Emilia Linderholm, photo by Christian Kjellstrom

Hi there! I’m taking a 15 minute “coffee break” today to blog with you.

I write it, you read it. That’s how it goes. Unless you care to comment. That makes me even happier! Go on…

Have you ever gotten home from work just exhausted, flat-out drained, and sunk into the couch thinking, “I don’t even have the energy to call the pizza delivery guy, much less talk with my spouse and family.”

Yeah, I feel that way some days. My head is buzz buzz buzz from brainstorming and meetings and conference calls, and then I crash.

When I was a journalist, I had a housemate, another reporter who worked in my newsroom. Sometimes we’d both get home from a deadline day, take one look at each other, and head to our respective rooms. It wasn’t personal. Robin just said, “I’m all out of words,” and that was that.

Is what you are now what you really want to be? Painting by Emilia Linderholm, photo by Christian Kjellstrom

But as a parent, I no longer have that luxury. I have two little people, Drew (age 3.5) and Audrey (11 months), and I find myself constantly teaching, talking, comforting, explaining. There is no break in the action, no opportunity to just tune out for the evening.

One of the teaching topics I visit occasionally with Drew is helping him learn things about our family. How to spell our last name, our address and phone numbers, and what his parents do for work. My husband’s a professor of mechanical engineering with a PhD in chemical engineering.

Guess how easy it is to teach that to a three-year-old?

We started with “Daddy is a teacher. He teaches big people.”

Now we’re onto “Daddy teaches a science called engineering to college students.” I think that’s stellar understanding for age three. And if you have (or had) a preschooler, you’ll know the ultimate follow-up question to any statement of fact, no matter how obvious.

Why. Why? Why? Why?

As we were describing Derek’s job and mine (“Mommy sells big buildings” and “Mommy teaches marketing” is our interpretation of my role in marketing commercial real estate), Drew asked why do we do our jobs?

Here’s one answer: “So we can get money to pay for everything we have, like our house and our food and our clothes, and so that we can take you fun places like the zoo.” Yep, I used that answer one time shortly before a trip to Seattle for work.

When I got home from Seattle, Drew asked, “Mommy, did you go to Seattle? For work?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you get money?”

“Yes.”

“Then can we go to the zoo?” Drew asked. Dang. That kid doesn’t miss a thing!

So this time, when he asked why we do our jobs, I told him another truth: “Because we like to. Daddy does science because he likes it. I do marketing because I like it. When you grow up, you can pick a job you like. What do you like to do?”

Drew didn’t have to think long.

“I like to paint!” he declared.

“Well, sweetie, when you grow up, maybe you can be an artist.”

Drew didn’t miss a beat. “I’m already an artist,” he said seriously. “I paint every day.”

Whoa, didn’t that just knock me back on my heels!

And so the truth I take away from that exchange is this: Don’t wait until you ‘grow up’ or some other milestone to give you permission to be what you want to be.

Be it now. Right now.

I call myself a “novelist” even though I’ve only written one and a half novels. I’m not waiting for an agent or a publisher to give me a nod before I can suddenly claim that title. I wrote a novel, I am therefore a novelist. Drew paints, right now, he is therefore an artist.

What you want to be? Can you claim it right now? Make what you want to be who you are (and introduce yourself accordingly). Go on. Do it. GO.

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