Well, only a little bit while I was filling the bottles, and when testing out the solution.

What do you do when a kid is really deep into a phase of character obsession? You give in and make everything about his birthday presents reflect that, or course. Well, you do if you are me and generally terrible at coming up with gift ideas.

Confession: I like to make a good chunk of the gifts I give just because I walk into a store to buy something for a person and can spend hours wandering in circles without coming up with anything. At least with making something I can tailor something generic into something I think they will enjoy.

So, what do you give a four-year-old who has a ton of toys and yet mostly just plays with whatever his baby brother is interested in because that’s how four-year-olds are? Bubbles. Also, because that is how I like to keep him occupied outside while said baby brother naps in the mornings.

I made a home-made bubble solution using 1 part baby wash (so it won’t sting so much if bubbles get blown into baby brother’s eyes, ahem), 1 part light corn syrup (so the bubbles are more elastic), and 2 parts water. I also made them slightly more special than store-bought bubbles by creating four smaller bottles of scented bubbles. I added a teaspoon of extract to each of the 3 oz containers to make chocolate, peanut butter, orange, and vanilla bubbles. Then I poured the rest of the bubble solution into the corn syrup and baby wash bottles with the labels removed and set about making my own labels for each bottle.

I created a Batman-esque symbol using his name and then labeled the bubbles with their ingredients, just because that is always a good thing to put on a label. I love Photoshop and Illustrator. Just saying. Anyway, I printed them on clear labels (and forgot how horribly the ink smudges on those labels so my mother and I had to layer packing tape over the top before we stuck them to the bottles) cut them out and stuck them on.

Did I mention I did all of this the day before his birthday party? Yeah, I’m really bad at waiting until the last minute on things like that.

But not as bad as the other part of his gift. Which I will tell you about on Wednesday since I started out writing this as all one post and it got very long and very wordy very quickly. But don’t worry, that one has a story that is just as entertaining as this was, or perhaps even more so.

Do you have a go-to gift idea? What do you get for small children when their birthdays/other gift-giving holidays come around?