Shelly is not allowed to bring food to her sons’ school for their birthday, so cupcakes are off the table. What she can bring is goodie bags, and in a TikTok posted September 10 on @shellykowatch she holds up a cardboard box full of them: paper bags in bright colors, each with a smiley face printed on the front. “I had to get really creative,” she says.
The three minute video opens under the title “School birthday goodie bags” with the words “Non Food” above it. She covers what she bought, what she refused to buy, how each bag gets packed and how the box gets to the classroom when she is not allowed past the front office.
The shopping took effort. “I spent a good two hours browsing online trying to find things that are a little bit more creative, things I hadn’t seen last year,” she says. Last year, by her count, “every single week was a kid’s birthday party, and they got sent home with goodie bags, a lot of pencils, erasers, notebooks, slime, and teeny, tiny little things.” One of those was never going in: “I don’t let the boys have slime, so I did not pack slime.”
She starts with the bags themselves. “Little smiley face paper bags. There’s blue, orange, green, purple, and pink,” she says, chosen to be “fun, bright, and colorful for the kids.” To match, she bought crazy straws and little smiley faces to put on them.
The item she is proudest of comes out of a yellow box. “This was my creative idea. I got invisible ink pens for all the kids because they come in these little packages. They come with, like, little notepads,” she says. She explains how they work, writing with the pen and then using the light on top to read it, and dates them: “This is definitely like a 90s 2000 thing.”
The cupcakes get a stand in. “And since I couldn’t bring cupcakes, I know all kids like stickers,” she says, holding up a sheet of cupcake stickers that kids design and decorate themselves. “Each kid will get one of these sheets, and they’re all different kind of cupcakes.”
The last item comes with a warning. “This is where some of the parents might hate me a little bit, but the boys have been asking for these for so long,” she says, pulling small squishy balls from a blue box. She later calls them “technically a stress ball.” Each one stays in its wrapper so that, in her words, “they can’t explode in the class or at home.”
Four things per bag, and she stops there on purpose. “To be honest, that’s all that I got. Because I didn’t feel the need to fill up the bag with a bunch of tiny, teeny, tiny little things that are gonna get lost or maybe tossed,” she says. “I feel like I was very intentional to the things that I got.” Her hope is that the kids play with them “for more than, like, 10 minutes.”
Packing starts with her sons’ own bags. “This morning, they freaked out. One of them wanted blue, obviously, the other one wanted pink,” she says. Into each go a straw, an invisible ink pen with its notepad, a cupcake sticker sheet (“Fits perfectly in there”) and a squeeze ball. “I think there’s 24 kids in the class,” she says. “I’m only gonna color coordinate the boys bags. Everyone else is gonna be a free for all.”
Delivery has its own rule. “I am not a certified volunteer. I am not allowed on campus other than the office,” she says, joking that clearance takes “a PhD” and being “fluent in five different languages.” So the box goes to the office for the boys to collect. Her caption reports the result: “The boys didn’t have a birthday party but we still got to pass out goodie bags,” and “The kids loved them!”
Her Non Food Goodie Bag Formula, Step by Step
Get three answers from the school before buying anything, because Shelly needed all three: what is banned (food, in her case), how many children are in the class (about 24) and where a parent may hand the bags over (the office only).
Pick one item from each of four jobs instead of a handful of trinkets: something to use at lunch (the straw), something to write with (the pen and notepad), something to decorate (the sticker sheet) and something to squeeze. With one of each, the count is easy. Twenty four of everything.
Swap the banned treat for a picture of it. Her cupcake stickers stand in for the cupcakes she could not bring, and the same trick works with cookie or ice cream themed stickers.
Think about the parents on the receiving end. She left out slime because she does not allow it at home, and she kept the squishy balls sealed in their wrappers. Anything that can leak or burst goes home wrapped or stays out.
Buy items that come individually packaged, as her pens did with their notepads, so filling a bag means dropping four things in. Test one of each in a single bag before committing, the way she found that the sticker sheet fit.
Let the birthday child choose a bag color first and fill the others at random. Then pack everything upright in one open box that can be passed across an office counter, with the teacher’s name written on the side.
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