Rebecca's Neurosis

Here's an email that Rebecca sent to some friends of hers. As Dave Barry says, "I am not making this up." For her birthday, I was going to take her skiing in Montana, but I'm reconsidering and thinking of donating honeybees on her behalf instead.


I have a question for you collectively as a group of mommies, and individually with different styles of doing things.

Jonah's been invited to a b-day party this weekend. A little boy in his pre-school class is turning 3 and they've invited the whole class plus many others to go to a farm/park for a party. It looks like it'll be a cool thing and so far there are 52 people who will be there (17 families or so , according to the evite guest list.) So a lot of people.

As always, I'm stuck on the gift. Having just returned from our trip, I'm on a total anti-consumer roll - even more so than before, if you can believe it. Personally, I don't want more STUFF in my house and my kids have more things than they will ever need. I could get rid of half their things and I know they wouldn't notice. As some of you know, we've always requested no gifts for our kids' parties, which suits us quite nicely.

So I'm struggling with a gift for this kid's party. Well, not really struggling. I thought that a gift donation to Heifer International would be a really cool thing.

For those of you who haven't heard of this organization, their goal is to eradicate hunger and poverty by giving animals (cows, goats, chickens etc) to poor people who can raise them for food and also pledge to give some of the offspring to neighbors, thus spreading the "wealth".

My question is, is this a horrible gift to give at a 3 year old's birthday party? I'd throw something else in perhaps, like a token cow toy or rabbit, depending on what I give -You can give a flock of chicks, a share of a cow, a trio of bunnies etc. - so he'd have something tangible from the gift and it would fit in with the farm theme of the party itself. But considering he's having 17+ guests, whatever gift I end up giving him is going to get lost in the pile anyway. At least that's my thinking.

I figure this donation is something meaningful, thematically appropriate, doesn't add clutter to their house, and doesn't require me to go out and buy something stupid for a 3 year old. My biggest personal beef with birthday parties is that I don't like buying this plastic kid crap for my own kid, and so feel bad about buying it for someone else's kid, even if perhaps that's exactly what they want (or have been convinced they want by commercials).

But by giving such a gift, is it open to some bad interpretation? Could they be offended? (By the way, I don't even know these people - her kid is in my kid's pre-school class and they've been there for about 3 weeks now. So I can't speak at all to their values.)

So, do me a favor and let me know what your take on this is. Keep in mind, if you say that it's okay to do, expect a llama donated on your kids' behalf at the next party (unless you thankfully say "No Gifts Please").