Easter Happy

I love giving gifts, probably even more than I love getting them.  Unfortunately...one of the things I've had to come to grips with this year is that I have financed my gifting habit with the Discover card way, way too much.  So, when I broke up with Discover I had to find alternative ways of getting my gift on.  The main thing I've done is started shopping ahead--after Christmas, I hit the sales--hard--and bought as many birthday gifts as I could for the coming year.  That's been a big help, and the ones I don't have already (wrapped, of course) in the closet we just budget for each month.  

Some of my favorite people to shop for, and buy happys for, are my teachers.  :)  I will say that I haven't bought nearly as much for them at the Dollar Spot since I don't fall back on my Discover card, and sometime's that's tough.  But I still do pick up little happys for them, and I've got Teacher Appreciation (first week in May) pretty well together, minus the notes.  That's all I'm gonna say about that, girls...you'll smile.  

The picture above is what happens when I need (okay, want!) to give a gift that I didn't plan for ahead of time and we're at the end of our budget.  I buy Kayci's teacher gifts as I find them (she's fun to shop for!) and for Easter, we gave her a cute set of notecards and pens that I put together more cheaply than I'd like to admit here.   But...when I did that, Noble wasn't in school, yet.  So, the day before his Easter egg hunt, I realized that I didn't have anything but I really WANTED to do something for his 3 wonderful teachers and the EEC administrators, since they've been so amazing to him.  At Wal-Mart they had these cute little tins for $1, so I got those and a BIG bag of LifeSavers.  For $10, I made 6 gifts (had to do one for Paula, too!)!  How gratifying is that?  I wanted to jazz it up a bit, so I cut cardstock paper grass and put that in the tin buckets, then filled them with LifeSavers.  For each person, I decorated a plastic Easter egg with her name then filled that with an Easter egg shaped note of thanks (of course, since I'm puntastic they all had variations of "You've been a LifeSaver!").  

Why blog about this?  Because I think happys are important, and can make people feel very happy and loved.  :)  I know GIVING them makes me happy, anyway!