Get to Work!

Finally earning her keep.

           Chris was hit with the enterprise bug this weekend. According to her father, she had the brilliant idea that she would make bracelets and sell them to strangers passing by on the streets. She set to work feverishly creating a cardboard billboard and cut strings for 15 bracelets, but inevitably she ran out of steam and finished only two of the masterpieces. After all, ‘Drake and Josh’ was on Netflix.

            You know how the rest of the story goes. The materials will sit for months, maybe even forever, until someone gets disgusted and throws it all away. That’s when Chris will throw herself on the ground and declare she could have been a bazillionaire if only evil, lazy adults didn't stand in her way.

            I suspect her enterprising spirit was awakened last week when Chris’ school decided to have a “Coins for Turkeys” fundraiser in which they asked students to bring in money to help buy Thanksgiving turkeys for the needy. True to her roots, Chris decided everybody needed food for the holidays and went about a quest to find as many coins as possible to donate.

Someday Mommy can retire while Chris
actually earns allowance for something other
than just being cute.

Since most of the coins from the bottom of my purse soon end up in her piggy bank, it was a no-brainer for her to donate her own money for the cause. But problems soon identified themselves when she realized if she donated all her hard-earned allowance, she would have no funds left for much-needed toy shopping.

It’s a conundrum for an only child who has spent most of her life having everything handed to her. It’s a fine line we walk in giving her all the things we always wished for as a child, and trying to teach her about compassion, independence and the value of manual labor. 

Although her father and I have talked extensively about the fact that we want her to have a job as a teenager so she can learn to save and pay for the things she really wants, this past weekend has me thinking a lot about the logistics of the whole thing. City life is vastly different than where he and I grew up as teenagers and in what is technically a completely different century.

She can’t walk home late at night like I did after a shift at the pizza restaurant, despite the fact that she is certain she will karate chop anyone who tries to hurt her. Mind you, this feat will be attained without one single karate lesson because she’s just that good. But in a big, bad city sometimes it’s not good for young girls to walk alone at any time of the day, even if you are a ninja in your own mind. And forget about a bus in the middle of the night – you know what kind of people are on the bus at midnight! (Haven’t you learned yet that I’m a continual stereotyper?)

So this leads us to either getting off the couch at very inconvenient times to deal with Chris’ work schedule in order to teach her about the value of promptness, or buying her a car of her own. Somehow I think this defeats the purpose of getting a job in the first place.

I don’t know why I’m so focused on it all right now since we have a good 8 to 10 years before it all becomes a serious issue, but pretty soon she’ll age out of the “ask Santa for it” stage and move into the “you will have to save up your allowance for it if you want it that bad” stage. Right now she only earns a dime every time she remembers to feed and water the dogs - which let me tell you must be supplemented or we’d be on a first-name basis with animal cruelty police. This doesn’t cut it anymore past the Coins for Turkey’s stage because there’s nothing left over for fun.

Chris is slowly starting to realize that just because they feel heavier and you have more of them in your hand, nickels aren’t necessarily as great as quarters or even dollars. Already it’s turning into a negotiation to fork out more of the real, cold, hard cash for chores she has to be nagged incessantly to perform.

I promise I didn't make her do this. She was one
of those weird babies who liked to clean.

Sometimes even when she does scrimp and save, the money mysteriously disappears. Sometimes it’s stuck at the bottom of the gumball machine with gumballs that are probably 18 months old. Sometimes I’m pretty sure the tooth fairy has to “borrow” funds from it whenever Chris loses a tooth because she hasn’t had time to go to the bank either and isn’t it all about the excitement of the dollar, not where that dollar has come from? That’s what I tell myself at 3 a.m.

The lack of funds is why, I suspect, that Chris has decided she needs enter the jewelry-making business. Her crudely-made beads on a string come at the low, low cost of $1 each. And the overhead, I’m certain, was covered by Daddy who was happy to have his kid involved in a craft that lasted all afternoon long. So it’s all pure profit!

Now the problem is that she assumes the world will be clamoring to beat down her door for the pleasure of owning one of her priceless designs. I asked her if she would be sad if no one that she asked wanted to buy what she was selling. After all, think how many people ask us outside the grocery store if we want to buy something and sometimes even when we do want it, we still have to say no.

Chris looked at me incredulously.

“Why wouldn’t my friends and family and everyone who knows me want to buy one of these? They are awesome!” she said.

Spoken like a true spoiled only child.

If you add feet, it looks like you have more money.