First Lesson in Finance

After a morning in the doctor's office confirming that my kids didn't have strep throat we headed home for much needed naps. Unfortunately we live in Oklahoma which means that sometimes naps are cut short by earthquakes. That was the case today. Zane was woken up by a little 3.4 earthquake, sadly not too major of one for these days. Zane came out from his nap with his piggy bank. He had decided that he wanted to buy Darth Vader pajamas with the money he had been saving. Apparently he saw some at the store yesterday with Daddy, who told him he could use his own money to buy some if he wanted them because he didn't need any jammies right now. My plan for this afternoon included cleaning my house, doing laundry, and packing for our trip to the farm tomorrow. It did not include a huge lesson on U.S. currency, budgeting, and finance. But you can't always plan things like that, so I went with the flow and dove into teaching Zane which coin was which, how much each was worth, how many of each were needed to make a dollar, so on and so forth.

Zane, my very visual learner, ate it up. He learned quickly, loved counting to one hundred, with pennies, and was through the moon when he realized he had enough for the random, terribly ugly, Star Wars jammies that he had seen in Wal-Mart. There were a few Canadian coins in there, which was confusing to Zane because "this one has a girl on it, no money has girls one it." Dang it America, what the hell?? Anyway, after I moved passed my rage towards the US Treasury, we finished counting all his coins, and four dollar bills. He had twenty six dollars and seventy seven cents. It was literally burning a hole in his pocket so we headed to Target to find some sort of Darth Vader paraphernalia for Zane to spend his money on.

 

 "Mom this is my money, I did NOT steal it." So glad he cleared that up for me, I was concerned he has robbed multiple piggy banks to get it.

Once we got there the difficult decisions began. There were no Darth Vader pajamas in his size, but there were Darth Vader jackets, shirts, pajama pants, underwear, hats, and of course the entire Star Wars toy isle, which was luckily very picked over. I remained very patient and kept my personal opinions of what he thought he should get to myself. We found Rowan some Darth Vader jammies, on clearance, in the midst of Zane's decision making. He was thrilled, but Zane remained stressed out about what to do. In the end he decided on the Darth Vader black and blue robe. I personally wanted to go with the awesome Darth Vader jacket, but it was not my money and not my decision to make.

We found the shortest line possible to check out in and quickly apologized to the lady who came up behind us, and warned her that we would be paying with all coins. Zane helped count out all his money and bragged to everyone who would listen that he was buying the robe with his own money. That he had saved his money for so long (truthfully about a year and a half). He had "worked hard" for it (i.e. helping with chores and finding spare change around the house). He made sure to get his receipt when he was finished, then quickly took the tags off and wore it out of the store, and for the rest of the day.

He needed to call Grandma, Aunt Abbey, and Daddy to tell them as soon as possible that he had made his first big financial decision/purchase. He was so proud of himself and I was so proud and blown away by my big boy. This evening after bath time he put his robe on, and only his robe on, and started walking around the house. Sadly it's not that kind of house and he was forced to at least put on underwear.

I wish I could freeze time, he is growing up too fast.