You love your mom, you really do, but your wallet can’t stand up to the demands of Mother’s Day. Taking her out to dinner at a trendy restaurant or to a pamper session at the spa sounds like a good idea until you calculate the costs. Luckily, there are ways to make your mom feel special without sacrificing essentials like rent and groceries.
A Tea Party
The scenario sounds like something a little kid comes up with, putting out a plastic tea set filled with lukewarm water, but it can be an unexpected twist on a Mother’s Day activity. The average person will be dragging their family to a packed brunch spot with long wait-times and expensive dishes. Instead of forcing her to get out of the house first thing in the morning, let her sleep-in and come over to your place for tea later in the day.
If you’re confident with your baking skills, you can make scones or cookies to go with each cup. If you don’t have the time or you’re afraid that the results will be on par with the contestants of Nailed It, you can pick up pastries from the bakery before she comes over.
Buy a blend of loose-leaf tea that she likes and brew her a pot. As an additional gift, you can get her a personal container of the blend and creative tea infusers that will make her smile.
Yoga Accessories
Your mom loves everything about yoga. The mindfulness, the music, the comfortable pants — everything. You wish you could get her a membership or a class pass, but that would empty most of your bank account.
What you can do instead is get her a brand-new yoga mat. Even if she has a perfectly good one, she’ll appreciate having one for her classes and one for the house. You can find options in-stores and online going for around $20 each.
If you have a moment to grab her phone on the holiday, you can also get her apps to help with her practice. The free app 5 Minute Yoga Workouts is a great motivator for when she doesn’t have enough time to go to a class — or worse, for days when the classes are all booked up. The app Insight Timer offers a massive library of free guided meditations to get to her to achieve relaxation while blocking out distracting sounds from around the house.
Do be warned, if your mom hasn’t expressed an obvious interest in yoga, don’t get her a present encouraging her to do it. It may not look as bad as buying a gym membership or a digital bathroom scale, but it doesn’t look nice, either.
An Upgraded Phone
Maybe your mom is the type of person that’s always glued to her smartphone, playing games and commenting on every single one of your photos that you post on Instagram. You wish you could get her a shiny new smartphone, but that purchase is way beyond your means. What you can do is make her current smartphone look brand new.
If it’s covered in micro scratches and scuff marks, you can hide all that cosmetic damage with a skin. Not only will it give the phone a fresh makeover — it will protect the back from getting more scrapes and scratches. The website dbrand has awesome skins for all devices in plenty of different designs like carbon fiber, marble and wood.
As part of the gift, you should apply the skin and the screen protector for her. You can also check to see if the phone’s functionality could use a tune-up. Run any neglected system updates, delete unused apps and free up storage.
You don’t need to max out your credit card to make your mom happy. It’s not the money that matters — it’s the effort you put into making her feel appreciated. It could be as simple as catching up over a cup of hot tea or acting as her free IT assistant for half an hour. With a little bit of effort, you can make her day.
