Birthday Parties and honeymoons

So my husband Kevin and I are planning on going on a real honeymoon for our fifth anniversary (which was a few weeks ago now) next year in March. we have no idea where we are going but it will be somewhere hot, all inclusive and be ridiculously cheap through some online last minute deal.

Of course ridiculously cheap still costs alot of money, so the idea came to us last year while trying to save for a big family trip at Christmas to see how much we could trim from the Christmas goose of outrageous spending and put that towards our travels. Turns out it worked pretty well and we ended up cutting our budget in half. Hurray for the winkels and all the souvenirs they could now afford in their exotic island destination!

"Could the same thing be done in the next year to save money for this second honeymoon we're planning? and could we cut more than Christmas back down to size?" we asked ourselves in February. The Creative Me said "Of course" we'll start with Birthdays.

Problem is, in our family... there's alot of birthdays. And now my daughter is starting to get invited to other kids' birthday parties and all those gifts start to add up. I also know first hand how much I DON'T want my daughter getting a bunch of useless plastic when her special days roll around, so the challenge became creative, meaningful, affordable gifts for my daughter to give to all her cousins and friends.

Solutions:
Well, right now I have a couple swimming around in my fishbowl, but the one I've settled on for the next round of parties are Scrapbooks and disposable cameras.
Perhaps this idea works best for little girls, but I personally think boys will be in to it too, and plan to use it for my nephews in September and November when their birthdays roll around.

First I started with the disposable cameras which I was able to get two for 10.00 at Walmart.
next step was a trip to Dollarama (MAJOR DISCLOSURE: I LOVE LOVE LOVE dollarama. I find the greatest stuff there when I walk the aisles with my super creative hat on)
I picked out some cute little scrapbooking kits for a dollar (although now I'm thinking I probably could've raided my own old stash and made some way cute sets of stuff)
and then I proceeded to make some cute little scrapbooks out of old cereal boxes and old scrap paper in the following few steps.

1. Cut the cereal boxes down to two squares of 8x8 each.

2. Cover with a 12x12 piece of scrapbooking paper.

3. Take about 8 sheets of plain white printer paper (fancier paper is nice too or even use scrapbooking sheets ) and cut them down to about 7x7

4. using a hole punch, punch three holes through the binding (this will take strength)

5 Cute scraps of ribbon tie through the three holes to make a cute album.

In total the whole gift cost $6 and some leftover scraps. Of course this is the simplest version of this idea to be done. You can go all out with leftover scrapbooking bits, papers, embellishments etc. and gift it with or without the camera. At Christmas time we gave our daughter a little disposable camera to take to the Aquarium we visited in Waikiki and it made the whole outing that much more fun for her, (although there were mostly pictures of her feet).
I'll put some pictures of the finished product in my next post.