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Wellington, New Zealand
welcome to my corner of the blog world! i love step, boxing, zumba, scrapbooking, photography, watching movies, walking the hills of my suburb, my family, and life in wellington. take some time to have a look around and be sure to say hi!

Sunday, September 8, 2013

happy birthday, i bought you a goat

let me start with a little backstory...

we're a little 'apple-fied' in this house, and when i say a little, i mean our house is like a mini shrine to steve jobs.

we have laptops, ipads, mac minis and apple tvs to name a few

the 6 of us all have iPhones 

not that it's any of your business, but all the girls have 'skin' in their phones, i.e. ever since mr scrappy and i owned our first iPhones [and consequently upgraded], we've operated a semi-complicated buy-in, hand-me-down scheme (complicated - in that it involves maths, and semi - in that i'm not really involved)

the girls pay for half of their phone, then at upgrade time, sell them back to mr scrappy (at which point i sell them on trade me [ebay]), then they pay for half of their next upgrade.

too bad if you don't understand.  the point is, for our girls, these are the 'perks' of being raised by parents who grew up in working class families.  our girls haven't been handed everything; they know the value of money.  end of story.

well, almost

BECAUSE we all have iPhones, and BECAUSE we we are an organised family, we make great use of the REMINDERS app. 

there's a groceries list [in the cloud] to which anyone can add items.  perfect for when someone goes off to the supermarket and you forget to say 'get milk'!  when the shopper checks the list, milk has been added!

mr scrappy and i have our own 'to do' lists (no, his isn't a 'honey do' list) and all 6 of us have a 'birthday list' which then rolls over to a 'christmas list'

this is perfect when it comes time to buy your child's/husband's/wife's birthday present

of course because anyone can add to these lists, a little mischief can be made, i.e. one daughter might find her list looking a little like this:

'cotton on t-shirts.  no wait, i own them all'
(this is funny because one daughter owns a LOT of t-shirts from this one particular store)

you get the idea


zoe turned 24 last late last month and her list was well populated with ideas.  the trick is to not actually TICK anything off, because then the birthday girl knows what she's getting!

mikaela's 17th birthday comes exactly TWO weeks after zoe's and her list is looking, well - a little empty.

"don't worry hun, i'll buy you a goat!"

this is a standing joke from the year i bought her teacher a goat (from the world vision website) as a teacher gift.  he didn't really need another box of roses chocolates (i never do that anyway) and my hand-made gifts weren't really male-teacher-friendly.

anyway, she replied "OK"
i replied "i was kidding!"
she replied "i wasn't!"

so, along with a few other bits and pieces bought by mr scrappy and myself, this is what my beautiful, caring, globally-minded teen has bought [with the money that we would have given her in the form of a mall voucher]:


measles vaccinations for 600 children
exercise books
500 pencils
mosquito nets for 1 family
5 litres of therapeutic milk
1000 water tablets

all this for the princely sum of $100

$34 for the vaccines
 $31.30 for the books
$14 for the pencils
$7.40 for the net
$5.80 for the milk; and
$8 for the tablets


food for thought.






1 comment:

mandyb said...

i love it!!!
good for them to leave the value of spending and saving!!
well done on also being organised with all those lists!! love it!!

and very cool gift idea...
we got given a goat once too from a family...very cool!!! and was good for the waist too!!