Will work for toys...

Sure.

She looks sweet.


But underneath that cute, crinkly blonde hair lurks the brain of a seasoned negotiator.

Seriously.

When this Grandlittle gets home from pre-school, I usually let her watch a little TV...ummm...educational of course...ummm... yeah... and on those educational TV channels they have a lot of advertisements for toys.

Every day we go through the standard four year old litany, "Gwamma, will you buy me that? For my birthday?"

And every day I repeat about 36 times, "Probably not, you already have a lot of toys."

This week I came up with a brilliant idea of making her work for a toy. You know, start building a healthy relationship with money, teach her young that hard work = benefits, and, oh yeah...hopefully quit the request for every new thing that flits onto the TV screen.

I made up a handy dandy little chart and explained the concept to her. She seemed suitable intriqued.


First we went outside and planted some mint. That went pretty well. She carried the bucket of compost, kinda/sorta dug the hole with her little purple hoe, and was even willing to get her hands dirty in the process.

Next we headed inside, where we washed our hands and I told her she was going to help me organize some cupboards.

The cabinets we were straightening were the tupperware and storage container ones, so I told her to separate all the glass and all the plastic and then we would group them.

That worked just perfectly.

It was when we went to start putting them back that things started falling apart.

She did NOT like my idea of stacking things and putting the lids by them. I told her we had to stack things or they would never fit back into the cabinet. She told me, and I quote, "That is not a very good way of organizing Gwamma. Let me show you how to do this."

Hmmm...

"Okay, smarty pants," I inquired, "If we do it your way, where am I going to put all the extra containers?" With hands on her little hips, she opened all the subsequent cabinets filled with baking pans and dishes and told me she would just empty them, too, and then there would be plenty of room.

Hmmm...

I asked her where we would put all the pans then.

She thought and thought.

"I'm just a worker person, Gwamma," she said, "If you want me to figure that out I'm going to need TWO toys."

...

...
Sigh...