Bath Supplies for the Bath Queen, compliments of Goodwill
Today, we're off to celebrate Christmas with my side of the family, so there won't be a Q&A post today. I do want to show you one of my successful Goodwill Christmas gifts, though!
Sonia is indeed the bath queen at our house. From the time she was very small, she's loved to stay in the bath for a r e a l l y long time. She does all sorts of imaginative things in the bathtub (when she was younger, she used to cook breakfast a lot. "I'm makin' you some beckwist, Mommy!"), and she never seems to be at all concerned about the water getting chilly. "I'm not cold, Mommy!" she says, through chattering teeth.
Anyways, because she loves baths so much, we often keep an eye out for fun bath things to give to her. She loves bath crayons, and she also is very fond of bath confetti and bath fizzers. We've bought some for her at Five Below before, but this year, I did much better than that.
All the loot pictured above (plus more that didn't make it into the picture) is from Goodwill. We've been keeping an eye out for bath stuff since her birthday in March, and whenever I found package of fizzers or confetti, I'd stealthily hand them over to Joshua along with some cash so he could sneak up to the cash register and buy them without Sonia's knowledge (there are advantages to having a five year old, that is for sure! They're not the most perceptive crowd out there!).
The prices at Goodwill beat even Five Below's prices...a lot of the fizzers only cost $.10 a piece. And because they were so inexpensive, I was able to buy her a lot of bath supplies. It'll take even her a while to get through all of those.
I love this post. I haven't thought of going to Goodwill very early in the year and just browsing for steals to keep for later. How do you manage to keep the kiddos from finding these? Do you stick them high up in a closet? (They're little... so this will work for a while I'm sure :p).
Good job on a very frugal christmas. And yay for a Wii! I saw someone with a controller---How fun!.
I just keep them under my bed...they all know they're not allowed to peek under there! lol
Aww how cute! I love that Joshua helps buy the stuff!
I'm the only one in my family who loves to take baths!
Looks like you had quite the finds!
In necessary, my family will make no bones about buying a gift - "WilliamB, go somewhere else and occupy yourself, I'm buying you something." So even if we know what store it's from we don't know what the item is.
If you look on the net there are all kinds of "recipes" for making your own smelly bath stuff--e.g. using Epsom Salts and various scents and colors in pretty bottles you can find at GW or garage sales.
Sonia might even have a great time making up her own concoctions to give as gifts, and it's very inexpensive (I think you can get a large carton of Epsom salts for just a few dollars).
What fun gifts! Gotta love thrift store prices.
That is great!!
Have you ever made your own bath bombs?
Purchasing them from Goodwill was probably the cheaper route, but I was just curious if you've ever made any.
Does anyone find shopping for bath products at Good Will unsanitary? Yes you may be saving a few pennies, but I would much rather buy them at a store, like Five Below, where i know the product is new and fresh??
Janknitz and Frugal Dreamer-great idea! I should look into that, because if I made my own, then there would be no plastic packaging involved.
Beauty Girl, everything I bought for Sonia was new in the package, so no, it doesn't seem particularly unsanitary to me. It's not like bath supplies get rotten over time (soap has no expiration date, for example), so a bath fizzer that's five years old works just as well as a bath fizzer that was bought yesterday.
Never made bath bombs. The irony here is . . .
I'm terribly allergic to scented products--my poor kids can't even keep gifts they receive that include "smelly bath stuff" because using it anywhere in the house just about kills me. When they receive something "smelly" as a gift, it costs me because I feel bad for them and we try to replace the smelly item with something equally cute but unscented (thank goodness for the Dollar Store!!!!).
But I remember my eldest making lovely bath salt gifts in nursery school (which we had to promptly banish to the garage) :o(.
AND, it keeps me frugal! I have to stay out of places that have a lot of artificial scents like department stores that have perfume counters and bath stores. Plus, we use a lot of homemade cleaning supplies (vinegar, diluted bleach, baking soda, etc.) that don't have all the artificial scents in them.
My kids' doctor recommended them not to use bath products because of urinary tract infections. One thing we did find that we could do (that the kids enjoyed) was coloring the bath water with food coloring. Sometimes we would put our daughter in the center of the bath tub full of water and add one color to one side of her and another color to the other side and she would have fun mixing the two colors.