Easter is coming up really soon here, and with my husband still out of work, obviously we’re going to be pretty reluctant to spend a lot of money on fun stuff for the kids’ Easter baskets. Which will no doubt disappoint my daughter, as she already is talking about what she wants in it.

Candy, candy, candy, of course. Some things are just obvious.

I haven’t done my buying for them yet, but I have been out looking at prices and figuring out what we can do for cheap.

To start out with, save the baskets from year to year, somewhere that the kids can’t get them out and play with them. My kids’ Easter baskets are pretty sturdy, so they should keep going for a long time.

If you use the plastic grass, try to keep that from year to year too. I’m thinking that shredded paper could be an alternative to buying if you don’t have it – not as pretty, but if you have a shredder and lots of junk mail, well, that junk mail could finally come in handy.

One nice thing about little kids – they don’t care about the quality of the candy you buy for them. I can’t stand the taste of cheap chocolate, and to be Easter-specific, I loathe Palmer’s chocolates, but kids really don’t care. Jelly beans go over well, and you can get them pretty cheaply.

More ideas:

Use Plastic Eggs

Those plastic eggs you can get this time of year can be a pain, but if you want the basket to look like it has more than it does, put the candy and other small items in the eggs, and reuse them from year to year. I can tell you from experience that the eggs can be hard to reclaim after the holiday, but do your best. Better to reuse them than to have them end up broken in the trash after just one use.

Fresh Fruits

I buy fresh fruit for the kids anyhow, and switching some of the candy out for fruit means the basket is healthier and really contains things I would have bought holiday or no holiday. Just pay attention to each child’s favorite fruits, and this could be a hit.

Compare Prices

For some people, those preassembled Easter baskets can be a good deal. For others, they cost too much for what you’d get.

Take a calculator and figure out the total cost to buy everything you’d put in an Easter basket on your own. Then compare it to the preassembled ones and decide which way it makes the most sense to go. The preassembled ones can be in the $15 and up range in a lot of cases, which really adds up when you are buying for more than one child!

Toys That Will Actually Be Used

A couple toys can be nice, even on a budget, provided they aren’t the kind of thing that your child will be ignoring the next day.

Cheap toys can include sand toys for the kids still young enough to play with them, crayons, toy cars and so forth. Dollar stores can have some great finds if you get shopping early enough, but I always try to stick with the principle of “will it really be played with? Tomorrow? After that?”

You can also make play dough, slime and other fun things for the kids and put them in the Easter basket. Little kids of course love bubbles, and if you have old bubble wands around the house it’s pretty easy to make your own bubble mix from water and liquid dish soap.

Encourage Their Hobbies

Think about cheap art supplies, seeds and pots for a garden, and so forth. I love it when I can give my kids things that encourage them to follow their own interests.

Books

Always a good idea to encourage kids to read. It’s pretty easy to find books in the dollar range for younger children, but this does get more challenging as the kids get older.

It’s rough when you stay at home and you find out your spouse has been laid off. A real shock to the system, even if you do earn a decent amount at home, as I do. After all, I don’t earn enough to support my family solo.

Having my husband get laid off has meant rethinking all our money plans. We are fortunate in some areas, such as our landlord being willing to go month to month with us for a time when she really prefers the security of a lease. Add that to his accumulated time off pay and severance pay, and we’ll be able to hold out for a little.

What may be the most helpful, however, is the outsourcing company we’re working with. I have high hopes of finally getting my husband’s career upgraded to the kind of path he has been wanting to be on. He has been completely rewriting his resume and the outsourcing company has a lot of job hunting resources.

That and I’m utterly shameless about telling people he’s looking. How else will they know to tell us about any jobs they’ve heard of.

I would love to see my husband finally get a career in the direction that he wants to go. I’ve been differing with my father-in-law in this. He wants my husband to get a job in the industry he’s already established in. I don’t, because with the way the economy is going such jobs are going to be scarce and unstable. Home decor doesn’t do so well at times like this.

We know for certain we can stretch things through February and quite probably through March. We’re not going to gamble all the way to the end, though. And of course the jobs he knows he could get but doesn’t want quite so badly will be applied for if necessary.

But the hardest part is making the financial cuts to help stretch things out. We don’t buy a lot of extras as is. Add in the fact that job hunting does cost money (just think how much gas is used in applying for and interviewing for jobs!), and it’s pretty hard to cut down on actual spending.

It’s hardest to explain to my daughter why we won’t be doing much of the fun little things like going over to 7-11 for a Slurpee, unless she brings her own money. On the other hand, 5-1/2 is a great age to start working with her own money a bit more anyhow, so that she gets more of an idea of how to use it well.

Some cuts we haven’t made yet. We still have cable television, for example. While it is perhaps not the best logic, my feeling on that is quite simply that we’re giving things one month, two at the most before we move in with my inlaws. The cable would be a pretty easy sacrifice for me, since I only watch a little television, but much harder on my husband and kids. Two months of paying extra, when we’re either going to keep living on our own or not… doable.

I’m going to be making heavy use of my frozen food supplies. In part this is to save money, and that’s what it’s all there for anyhow. But also I don’t want to have to find room for it at my inlaws should we have to resort to that. At worst I’ll have to restock it later.

It is so nice to not have to buy a lot of meat at the store! And I’ve really been needing to make those turkey bones into soup anyhow! Mmm!

The big thing I’ve been doing is trying to ramp up my own business. It’s not all on my husband, after all. It’s hard to acheive something that I’ve been working on for ages, but this has been the push to make me try some new things. I’ll be releasing my first ebook for sale soon, for example.

The scariest part is doing a bit of my own job hunting. Nothing saying my husband and I can’t trade positions. We’re determined to keep ONE of us at home, but which one?

I do NOT want to work outside the home. I love what I do. But if that’s what it takes, yes I will do it, gladly.