First Dollars

As I mentioned in the post about the boys' hair cuts, Caleb and Ethan each got their very first dollar from their generous hair stylist, Mr. Mickey. Since the dollars were given directly to them and they were earned for good behavior, I decided to take them to the Dollar Tree on Friday to make their first ever independent purchases. (To be honest, I was quite tempted to just stick the dollars in their piggy bank and delay this whole introduction of money in stores, since I have an idea of how it may change the landscape of our shopping experiences, but I took the plunge anyway. I'll let you know how it turns out.)

Caleb was very excited about going to the store to pick out anything he wanted to buy with his dollar. He was chatting about the possibilities, and I was pleased to hear him brainstorming about things he could buy other people. Buying "something pretty" for his good friend Addison came up more than once, so I was quite curious to see what he would end up choosing. Ethan kept saying that he was going to buy a yummy, and I was pretty sure about the direction his dollar would go :)

I decided before we went in that I wasn't going to steer them at all with their choices. This time, I wanted to see what they chose completely on their own (particularly Caleb, since he had talked about buying something for someone else). We walked around for a while, and Caleb collected about five items in the cart as possibilities to consider. Ethan's latched on to a hard baton with balls on either end, which I immediately wished he hadn't seen, since I knew it would end up being used to "bonk" people and things and have to be confiscated regularly. But I stuck to my plan and let him choose what he wanted.

After we'd walked around for about fifteen minutes, I told Caleb it was time to decide what he was going to buy. In the cart, he had a bag of colorful rocks, a package of stickers, a toy car, a heart-shaped dream-catcher for Addison, and one of those eyeglass/nose silly masks. He quickly eliminated the first three and held up the mask and the dream catcher. Caleb had been giggling at the mask ever since he saw it and I knew he really liked it. As he stood their looking back and forth, I was sure inside that he would choose the mask. He looked up at me beseechingly and said, "Mommy, can I buy two things." I shook my head gently and told him that he only had one dollar, so he had to choose only one thing. He let out a dramatic, whole-body sigh and said quietly, "I want to get the dream-catcher for Addison." I was very surprised and very proud. I told him that he had made a very good choice to buy something for someone else. I let the moment sink in, and then I told him that I was going to use my dollar to buy the mask for him, because I wanted to make him happy like he was going to make Addison happy. His face broke out in a HUGE grin and he hugged me and said "THANK YOU MOMMY!"

We had plans with Addison's family that evening, and Caleb could hardly wait for the four hours to pass until he could give Addison her dream-catcher. He gave it to her as soon as she opened the front door, and she was as pleased as she could be.

(By the way, in explanation of the pictures below, Friday happened to be a dress-up day...the boys wore their pirate costume and doctor's scrubs all day long, for no particular reason.)