Do you like giving gifts? What do you enjoy more – giving gifts or receiving them? A surprisingly large number of people report that they actually prefer giving gifts to receiving them. There’s nothing like seeing the recipient’s face light up as they see your thoughtful gift.

Of course, we often find ourselves giving unthoughtful gifts. I once gave a coworker a generous Starbucks gift card. I felt all warm and fuzzy inside about giving such a nice gift, until I remembered that he once told me that he hates coffee and can’t even stand the smell of coffee! So much for a thoughtful gift.

What I had forgotten when I gave that gift card was that giving gifts is not really about the monetary value of the gift. It is more about finding an item that would fit the recipient, that would bring a smile to their faces and be useful to them. If you know the recipient well, you should be listening to them throughout the year, taking notes – and I mean that literally. You should actually write down gift ideas for the important people in your life throughout the year.

If you don’t know the person very well, it’s more difficult to find a truly thoughtful gift, but you should still try to avoid falling back on some kind of a default present. Try to find something that unites usefulness with style – those are the gifts that are most fun to receive. For example, if you’re going to a baby shower and need to find a unique baby gift, try to come up with a gift that is nicely presented yet contains items that the expectant parents can actually use.

Spring is here and we’re in a good mood! How can you not be in a good mood, with temperatures finally rising, snow melting, and everything blooming?

Spring also seems to be a hot season for baby showers – is it the same for you or is it just us? We’ve been invited to plenty of baby showers and as always are adamant about bringing a gift that would not be just useful, but also fun and festive. So we put together a quick list of great baby gifts for spring. We would love to know which is your favorite!

Baby Bouquets

Needless to say, our baby bouquets are great for spring. Spring is all about flowers, and these bouquets look just like flowers – until the recipient realizes that these are actually baby onesies, hats and socks carefully rolled and wrapped and presented as beautiful flower bouquets! Talk about a sweet surprise.

Baby Shower Gift Baskets

Make your own spring-themed baby basket! Fill a pastel-colored basket with baby products and decorate with pretty flowers and leaves. Blue for baby boys and pink for baby girls are classic choices, of course, but yellow and white are fresh too.

Baby Books about Nature and Spring

A little unorthodox perhaps, but we love to give baby books as a baby shower gifts, especially these days when kids don’t read nearly as much as they used to. There are many baby board books that focus on nature, flowers and seasons. Buy a few, wrap them in a pretty pastel-colored gift wrap and a ribbon, and accompany with a hand-written note.

When it’s time to find that perfect baby gift for someone in your life who had just had a baby, or who is hosting a baby shower, it’s fairly easy to give a great, unique baby gift if you have a limitless budget. In fact, in every area in life, working without a budget gives you the freedom to buy something truly fabulous.

But for most of us, reality dictates that we do need to stick with a budget. I don’t necessarily see this as something bad! Finding a great new baby gift for less is just like finding an awesome top on sale – dressing well on a budget is an art, and gifting well on a budget is also an art. Instead of looking at a gift budget as something limiting, try to look at it as a fun challenge – can you find something truly great while staying within your budget?

Obviously, if the baby gift is for someone very close to you, your budget will be bigger than $35. But since $35 is truly affordable for most, I was curious to find out if I could find great new baby gift while sticking with a self-imposed budget of $35. Here’s what I found:

1. Baby Bunch offers several amazing, truly unique baby gifts for under $35. Sure, I’m biased, but take a look at these super cute “cupcakes” ($34.95) which are in fact four onesies rolled into a cupcake shape:

Another personal favorite of mine and a very affordable baby gift ($24.95) are the Crayon Rompers:

And of course, at just $9.95 each, you could buy a “bunch” of three of these super cute Lollipop Onesies and still remain within your budget:

2. Baby Gift Baskets. Most generic, pre-assembled baby gift baskets start at around $50, but if you make your own baby gift basket, using a large basket filled with various baby items such as lotions, shampoos etc. you can generally stick with a budget of $35, especially if you use mini versions of the products – which would also enable you to include more products.

3. Books. I said here on this blog several times already that I love giving books as a baby gift, especially classic books, which the child and the family will be able to treasure for many years. With prices for a hard cover book ranging from $10-$20 in most cases, you can get a collection of 2-3 classic books, beautifully wrapped and – of course – accompanied by a hand written note. It’s truly a classic gift.

4. Cleaning Service. Perhaps this is cheating, but one option is to combine your $35 with a few other friends and get the new parents a certificate for professional cleaning services for the first few weeks after the baby is born. This is one of the gifts that are truly appreciated by tired, overwhelmed new parents, and is well worth the extra effort of orchestrating a group gift.

Finding a great baby gift when budget is tight is always a challenge, but as you can see, with a bit of creativity and some research, it is completely possible to find delightful baby shower gifts even with a relatively small budget.

We’re doing a blogger outreach right now, reaching out to mom bloggers and asking them to review our medium baby bunches.

The baby bunches are offered in pink, in blue and in a gender-neutral yellow, and since each blogger (and giveaway winner) gets to pick their color, it’s interesting to me to see how they make these color choices. (To receive information about our giveaways, as well as Twitter-only promotion codes, please follow us on Twitter.)

I definitely see a trend there: moms who are expecting girls, or who have friends who are expecting girls, are asking for a pink bunch. Moms to baby boys are requesting blue bunches, and those who are not sure yet about what they will do with the bunches after reviewing them – maybe anticipating a baby shower at some point in the future – are opting for a neutral yellow.

I always assumed that “pink for girls, blue for boys” was something cultural and arbitrary, but when researching for this post, I discovered that there is actually research that says that women across cultures show preference for red-based colors, including pink and lilac and that the reason dates back to women’s ancient roles as gatherers (while men were hunters) – women learned to become attuned to the reds of the ripe berries and other fruits and to prefer these colors.

Like many other human behaviors, “pink for girls, blue for boys” is likely a combination of genetic and cultural influences. Of course, not everyone accepts this norm and some actively rebel against it. When my first daughter was born, I dressed her in many colors, including soft blue, and avoided pink as a matter of principal! Of course, people kept asking me why I was dressing a girl in blue (the horror!) and when she turned three, she insisted, like many other little girls, to ONLY wear pink. I obliged her.

So, when choosing a baby gift, should you follow traditional color norms, should you rebel against them, or should you go with neutral colors? My personal recommendation, when bringing someone a gift, would be to definitely not rebel – that would be a mistake in terms of gifting etiquette. I would say that if you know the person well enough to know their personal preferences, definitely go with that. If you’re not sure, or in the case of, say, a coworker baby gift, neutrals such as yellow or white are probably best.

Having said that, if you know the baby’s gender, and you are in the United States, getting a pink baby gift for a baby girl or a blue baby gift for a baby boy would probably be just fine. The cultural norm is so deeply ingrained here that I can’t imagine anyone would have any problem whatsoever with following the tradition.

As for our baby bunches, we designed the pink baby bunch specifically for baby girls, the blue baby bunch specifically for baby boys, and we also have two gender-neutral baby bunches: the yellow bunch and the white winter bunch.

When my first daughter was born, my husband’s workplace sent us a large, pink flower arrangement accompanied by a big white stuffed bear.

I remember this gift not so much because I treasured it for months, but mainly because we have photos of me sitting, tired and frazzled, next to the dining room table where we placed the arrangement.

The flowers survived for a couple of days – I was too tired and busy to properly trim them and take care of them – and the bear had to be tossed because a tag attached to it clearly said “small parts, not for children under 3.”

Was it an unthoughtful gift? In a way it was, because I had no use for the flowers and no time to care for them; and the stuffed bear wasn’t an appropriate gift for a newborn. I can’t say that I was unhappy with the gift though – it wasn’t inexpensive, and it showed that they cared enough to acknowledge the big event.

However, I would certainly have preferred a more useful gift.

The main problem when getting baby gifts for staff or for coworkers is that you can’t get too personal. In many cases, you don’t really know the person all that well, and you also have the constraint of keeping the gift appropriate, so “fun” or “naughty” gifts are out of the question.

But going for the standard flower arrangement, with or without a stuffed animal, with or without a box of chocolates, is the easy way out. How about getting the new mom a more useful gift?

A few ideas for useful and thoughtful coworker baby gifts:

1. Gift cards. If this is a corporate gift for a staff member, or if a few coworkers combine their gifts to purchase a single card, this can be a great new baby gift, because it is very practical and it enables the new parents to buy whatever they need, or want, for the new baby. The main drawback of a gift card is that it lacks flare and style – it’s just a notch above giving cash.

2. Baby clothes. Newborns go through so many clothes, that a gift of baby clothes is always appreciated. If you don’t want to settle for a boring, uninspired gift of baby clothing, go with Baby Bunch – their baby clothes gifts are beautifully arranged into baby clothes bouquets and baby clothes gift baskets. Gorgeous, practical and always appropriate, this is one of my favorite baby shower gifts these days.

3. Gift Baskets. I like to give a spa gift basket for the new mom. Moms never fail to be ecstatic about getting a pampering gift for themselves for a change, especially during a time in their life when the baby takes precedence and their own needs become less important.

Personally, I would avoid sending flowers to a coworker or to a staff member who just had a baby. Sure, it’s an “easy” solution, but it’s one of the most banal gifts you can possibly give.

Photo by roxeteer