I've been giving Amelia Cheerios for a few weeks to help her with her fine motor skills. Well I'll tell you: if you have a baby DON'T BUY INTO THIS!! No way! Ever since she's figured out how to use her fingers and thumbs all in unison and to move things from her hand to her mouth it's been a huge disaster around here. You want to delay this skill as long as possible. Amelia now crawls around the floor picking up whatever she can find. I'll vacuum and pick everything up off the floor but then she manages to collect odds and ends in her mouth somehow. Suddenly I'll see that her mouth is full and I will pull out a hairball (I shed a ton of hair!), a little piece of string, a piece of lint, AND a leaf. Crying out loud kid! Then I'll set her back down and see her crawl over to some item she sees on the floor that I still can't see even as I watch her go toward it. And she'll quickly shove whatever it is in her mouth and keep on crawling. It's as if she has some need to collect things in her mouth! She couldn't care less as to what it is, it must go in.
Well I called Dave Ramsey on Friday and talked to him about how to help the kids save their "save" money. Not how to save, but more or less what they should be saving for. Should they be saving for college, a care, their wedding...? Well Dave said to have them choose something they really wanted and to take a picture of it and have them save for that until they learn the concept of saving and can save for college a few years down the road. They can spend their "spend" money each week as they want to. So yesterday after we sat down to divvy out their money they earned, based on commission, we took a family trip out to Toys R Us, Lakeshore Learning, and Target. Elisabeth had $6 to spend, Noah had $2 and we were on a mission to help them find something to save up for.
It was a disappointment to both my hubby and I becasue we remember Toys R Us being a lot bigger, more organized and cleaner. The kids didn't even really find anything they were dying to have. They did have us take a few pictures of a few things and they are going to think about which item they want to save for.
We went to Lakeshore Learning after Toys R Us because it was right across the parking lot and they actually found way more things they wanted to purchase their than in Toys R Us. That made hubby and I happy. Elisabeth ended up spending $3 and some odd cents there.
We then went to Target. They found nothing worth purchasing here. Which was funny because normally they both spend all their money here.
It's hard to teach them that they can save up their small amounts of money to get something bigger. It was a difficult concept to explain while at the store. Elisabeth ended up breaking down crying in Toys R Us saying, "why does everything cost so much? I hate saving!!" She was so excited because she was sure that her $6 was going to allow her to buy whatever her little heart desired. I'm hoping that over the next couple months the kids will learn to value their things more and also that they will see the value in a dollar and saving it for something they really really want!
Today hubby and I sat down to discuss finances more. Man ever since starting Financial Peace University, we spend a few minutes everyday talking about our money. It's something that used to cause a little anxiety and maybe even contention when we would discuss it. But now we enjoy discussing how we are working toward our goal of being debt free. We even called and closed my American Express card, which we had paid off last week. They lady couldn't figure out why in the heck we'd close it. It made me laugh. We even talked about expenses we knew would be coming during the next several months and how we needed to start setting money aside each month to save for these expenses. It's something we've never done before. That sounds sad, but it's true. I've never thought to save up for something like that. We'd just take each month at a time and pay for things that needed to be paid for that month. If it didn't get paid for in cash, it went on a credit card. Not anymore!
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