Greatest Toy/Kids and Money

This is kind of a combination of two posts, since I am just too lazy to break it down into two and the first kinda sorta leads into the second anyhow. Don’t like it? Tough noodles.

The greatest toys, besides the empty boxes expensive toys come in that kids play with for exactly 4.2 minutes then set aside in favor of said box - almost always without fail - are the ones that don’t cost much.

The kids were being crabby in Wal-Mart and had no desire to wander peacefully up and down the aisles while we gathered “junk” like dish soap, Pull Ups, and toilet paper, so I grabbed some pinwheels (you know, those shiny metallic spinners on a stick?) and they were entertained for so long that I even had time to compare prices instead of just grabbing the first case of shit paper on the shelf. They played with them all through the store (handing them over only long enough for the cashier to ring them up), all through the next store, on the ride home (4 laughing hyenas in the back seats when the air from the windows made them spin really fast), and then for hours after they were home. At $0.97 each x4, I have to say it was money well spent.

My kids are. . . well. . . strange. They got all gooey and excited over SCHOOL SUPPLIES. They went ape-shit over crayons, pencils, and notebooks. I thought they would pee their pants over new backpacks for school. Even my 3-year-old got a new bag since she is going to go to “school” this year in the early childhood program (she has speech/language delay from her sensorineural hearing loss since birth). “My Dora-Dora bag” she says.

Thank Heaven they did not have a SpongeBob bag or I would have never gotten it off her back and would have had to scan kid-and-all at the checkout counter. You laugh, but it has happened to me before: Once when I got her shoes, she refused to take them off after trying them on and I had to put her on the belt after the cashier turned it off, so she could scan my kid’s foot. They were laughing 16 registers on either side. The next time, in a Payless store, she refused to take off the Strawberry Shortcake shoes she wanted (yes, I spoil her) and thought she was going to climb on the belt to get scanned - but there was no belt. The cashier thought I was nuts. The kid refused to take them off though, so she - I can’t believe a 2-year-old figured this out - pulled the tag off and handed it to the cashier. I thought it was hilarious but the cashier was a bit of a wanker.

The kid is too damn smart for her own good, and mine too. At the ripe old age of 2, she had already made the correlation between ice cream and money. I asked her if she wanted ice cream, and what kid doesn’t? I told her that she needed to give this money (I gave her a $5 bill) and told her to give it to Daddy and tell him to get us some ice cream. Now when she sees money, she instantly associates it with ice cream. She finds coins and brings them to me, signs “ice cream” and gets excited. She opened her birthday card the other day and there were two $1 bills in it, and she started flailing the “ice cream” sign. She even tried to hand over the money when we gave her ice cream and cake, thinking she had to pay for it.