Mom Calls Out In-Laws for Intentionally Disregarding 4-Year-Old’s Birthday Wishlist

When you're a kid, there are fewer things more exciting than celebrating your birthday. All of your favorite family members and friends come to hang out with you. You get to have delicious cake and play with all of your loved ones, and you get a ton of cool swag, or maybe that special something you've had your eyes on and have been so good (hopefully) to try and earn.

And when you're a parent it's hard not to take joy in seeing how stoked your kids get for their own special party, even if they're super stressful to plan and coordinate. This could be why one Mumsnet user was so miffed about the gift situation for her 4-year-old daughter's birthday party.

She writes in the viral post about how excited her daughter, "DD" was about her birthday and the specific presents she's been patiently waiting and behaving well for: DD is 4 tomorrow, since she was born we've had a relatively strict policy of only buying toys etc. for her birthday or Christmas. If she sees something in a shop/advert we say she can add it to her 'list' (not a physical list anywhere). This is the first time that she's really started to get into this and there are 3/4 things that have been on her 'list' for a long time and that she really wants."

"As her birthday has gotten closer she will often talk about how excited she is to get these things, they're only little bits and pieces but she's waited so patiently for them."

All of this build-up is to really drive the point home that these are the specific gifts that DD wanted, then cue her in-laws who have been wanting to cultivate a better relationship with the young girl.

So while they were at a wedding, they asked what they should get DD for her birthday, and mom shared the "list" of things that she wanted and then showed it to her in-laws, who said that they would much rather get her something that she actually wanted than guess. So far so good.

But then, they left OP in a bit of a pickle the night before the birthday party. The Mumsnet user writes: "Fast forward to last night and on the phone MIL casually mentions they've all clubbed together to buy DD a 'big present' altogether. I said (as casually as I could!) oh what about the things on her wishlist, and was told that they decided not to because they saw this instead and it's 'much better'."

"Now I'm sure this is probably true, nonetheless, it's not what we agreed and what she's looking forward to. Now I've had to panic buy the bits she wanted and I've got to make a dash to 2 clicks and collects this afternoon to grab it as Prime wouldn't get them here in time."

"I'm pretty miffed about this, DH took more of a 'she wouldn't even notice if she didn't get what she'd asked for' stance and that she should be grateful for anything. I, on the other hand, am thinking that if we're going to take a hard line stance of not buying stuff 24/7 then we should deliver on our promises to get her what she wants. Obviously as she gets older we'll need to add some boundaries to this (no xbox, ps5 AND switch thank you!) but we're still in the rollerskates and barbies stage."

Several Mumsnet users responded by stating while Mom had every right to be upset, she should have known that something like this would happen and that leaving the decision to purchase gifts up to the in-laws meant that there was a chance they would decide to get a gift of their own for DD.

Others sympathized with her plight, however, and expressed that the same thing has happened to them with their own in-laws and they were frustrated by the fact that people would offer to know what gifts were on the wish list and then decide to go and do their own thing.

What do you think? Was OP wrong to trust her in-laws? Or should she have expected them to make good on their offer?