Barbie, $1

I was a foster carer when I was 24 but I knew nothing about children. For instance, I didn’t know children played with toys. I knew about playgrounds and Disney videos, but there wasn’t a shred of plastic fantastic in my house. It wasn’t until I took a child to a doctor’s waiting room and she pounced on the toys that I twigged. I didn’t know much about op shops then, either. I thought op shops were smelly places you went to find a funny shirt. This is by no means a comprehensive list of the things I didn’t know when I was 24, but for the purposes of letting it be known that toys are great value at op shops while funny shirts are actually a bit thin on the ground, it’ll do.

Nutcracker toy, $2

It’s now been about two years since I started sourcing everything second-hand, and I’ve started to lose track of the value of things in the real world. When I saw this nutcracker for $2 at an op shop, I was excited. The children are fond of The Nutcracker ballet, so it seemed like a special and unusual thing to bring home. But when I turned it over I saw that it’s original price was a mere $2.99, and that it was from Dimmeys. If I’d seen it at Dimmeys, lined up with hundreds of others, I most likely would’ve dismissed it as just another uninspired Christmas decoration. But because it was all alone amongst stacks of frying pans on a cluttered shelf, it called out to me. So who’s the fool then?



Humphrey, $6.75

I’m as partial to a pretty face as the next person. I love a good Gwyneth Paltrow photo shoot and I was in raptures over Eva Green’s Midnight Poison perfume ad. But I don’t need my doctor to be beautiful, nor my favourite authors and musicians. And I don’t think children care half as much about physical perfection as TV executives seem to. Here’s Humphrey recently took over the 3.30pm timeslot from the glamorous girls of Hi-5, and my daughters haven’t felt deprived at all. In fact, they were thrilled with this brand new plush Humphrey, even though it has no nose.