Henry had strong opinions about his birthday cake this year, and those plans changed repeatedly. Sample plan: “A two-layer round lemon cake with green vanilla icing in between the layers, and blue lemon icing on top with ‘You are 6!’ in green vanilla icing and dots of purple lemon icing around the edges!” I’m pretty willing to mess around with stuff like this. I won’t/can’t do much decoration artwork, but I’m willing to spoon a batch of frosting into four bowls and stir in different flavors/colors we already have on hand.

Every time we discussed it, it was a different cake he had in mind. When I told him it was time to make his final decision, he said he wanted a vanilla rectangle cake (yay, rectangle! the easiest!) with chocolate frosting, and then a big green vanilla 6, and then dots of purple lemon frosting surrounding the 6. Easy enough.

When the cake was cooling, though, Henry expressed surprise that it was vanilla, not lemon. I reminded him that he’d made his final decision, and now it was too late for changes. He was okay with it. (If he’d been very upset, I probably would have baked another cake since I’d bought both cake mixes before I knew what he’d decide, but he seemed more like a kindergartner who’d lost track of his most recent decision.)

I noticed at his birthday party that he didn’t eat much cake, but we were having cake before the presents and he was VERY EAGER to get to the presents. Also, I don’t think he particularly likes cake: he’ll eat it, but he doesn’t go nuts for it.

Then, yesterday, and this will seem unconnected at first, I offered him a hard candy from a box of See’s Little Pops, and he chose vanilla, saying it was his favorite flavor. Then as he was eating it, he kept complaining mildly that it didn’t really TASTE like anything. I said that was how vanilla WAS, and please stop complaining about a nice treat.

(Are you starting to form a theory? I was still completely sans-theory at this point.)

Then, today, he was telling me about a cake they’d made at kindergarten. He said it was a lemon cake. Then he whapped his forehead in frustration and said, “I mean VANILLA. URG. I always get those words mixed up!”

Me: *FINALLY GETTING IT.*

Those two words DO have a lot of sounds in common. And OMG, “vanilla” cake is YELLOW, just like lemon cake. And he kept switching his cake choice from lemon to vanilla and back again, sometimes during the same description. And he was surprised when I made him a vanilla cake when he thought he’d been clear about wanting lemon.

Me: “Henry! Were you disappointed in the taste of your birthday cake?” Henry: “Yes”—but in a matter-of-fact way, not whiny or self-pityingly or resentfully or “FINALLY YOU GET IT” or anything. Just like, “I am not startled by that complete non sequitur of a question, and the answer is affirmative. Now ask me my favorite color.”

Anyway, I have a lemon cake in the oven.

You may have noticed I have been a bit of a Tangle of Stress recently. OMG allowances!! OMG music lessons!! OMG pianos!! OMG guinea pigs!! I’ll bet if I kept track on a calendar, I’d find I was ALWAYS a mess this time of year—and by “this time of year” I mean “right before school lets out.” The children’s summer looms before me, MENACINGLY.

I try to sign them up for stuff, and it sends me nearly over the edge to try to plan it. It’s like, if I sign Edward up for this one-week day camp he wants to do, and I sign Elizabeth up for this other one-week day camp she wants to do, and then Henry is in day-camp all summer because otherwise life is intolerable, and then swimming lessons are offered in four 2-week sessions and they can’t take a session if they’ll miss a week so it makes the most sense to do two weeks of day camp in a row but it would be more fun to spread the camps out a bit, and then archery lessons are only offered the first and third weeks of July, and then Elizabeth wants to do a Girl Scouts sleep-away camp and I don’t know if I can’t stand that but on the other hand I don’t want to squash her independence/bravery just because I’M scared, and both older boys are doing swim team, and I need to make sure I’m not signing myself up to drive three children three different directions at the same time, then SOLVE FOR X.

And summer activities have almost universally poor information. I read through it again and again, thinking “I am an adult with a reasonable level of education, and I am the exact target audience of this pamphlet. I should be able to understand where this gymnastics camp is located, what time of day it takes place, how to sign up, how much it costs, whether children have to already be taking lessons there in order to participate in the summer program, and what level of previous gymnastics experience is required.” BUT NO. Perhaps when the children are older, I will start a new career of Writing Camp Pamphlets. I know very little about Selling A Camp (which seems to be the current emphasis of such pamphlets), but I DO know WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE WHY HOW.

My MAIN-main fret right now is Girl Scout camp. It’s Elizabeth’s first year, but does she want to do day camp? No. How about the 4-day sleep-away camp? No. She wants to do SEVEN-DAY SLEEP-AWAY CAMP. And partly because of fretting and partly because of oblivious newbieness, I didn’t seriously look into signing her up until now, when it turns out we are past the sign-up date and will have to pay a $20 late-registration fee, AND all the camps she most wanted are full. So now I am also trying to solve for Y: “Well, there’s one 7-day one for her age group, but it’s the last one in August, and she was hoping for June or July, and so was I because I wanted to get the camp counselors before they were burned out. Or here’s another option, but it’s for grades 2-5 so she’d be in with girls about to go into 6th grade? That doesn’t seem right. Well, what about this one? Right time, 2nd and 3rd graders, 7-days! Oh, it’s horse camp. Here’s another one, but that’s at the place that’s four hours away. This one seems PERFECT!!–oh, it’s full.” What my lying-awake brain wants me to do is go back in time and sign up for it when she could have had her first choice.

I am thinking of getting a guinea pig. Henry’s preschool classroom had a guinea pig, and it was a DOLL. My friend who had a son in Henry’s class got a guinea pig because of that experience, and her guinea pig is ALSO a doll. When my friend watches TV, she’ll get the guinea pig and snuggle it. (She puts a towel under it. Evidently guinea pigs are of the “peeing any old time without seeming to notice it” category of animal.)

I have two main concerns:

1. Another of my friends had guinea pigs, and it was a disaster. Something like the first one dying quickly, and being replaced with one that turned out to be pregnant, and then tumors and mites and multiple expensive trips to the vet, ending in the guinea pigs being expensively put to sleep, etc. I don’t remember all the details; I mostly remember her saying “NEVER AGAIN.”

2. We have cats.

Elizabeth happened to be working on a Brownies badge that had to do with pet care, so as part of that we researched guinea pigs. According to what we found, guinea pigs can theoretically co-exist with cats; there were even photos of a cat cuddling with a guinea pig. But it looks like actual experience varies (duh), and I’m worried we’d end up with the cats, like, sitting on top of the guinea pig’s cage and the guinea pig stressed/terrorized/squealing.

Or maybe it would be great. We have cats and fish, after all, and they co-exist better than peacefully: the cats LOVE to “watch Fish TV,” and I think it significantly improves their indoor-cat existence, and the fish don’t seem to care at all. Not that I think I could necessarily pick up on a fish’s mood. But fish seem to communicate stress by swimming weird and/or floating dead in the tank, and they’re not doing either of those things. And, AND, we found some fish information that SUGGESTED riling up the fish to keep them from being bored, and it seems like having a cat periodically thud against the side of the tank fits that bill excellently.

I have my eye on a guinea pig at the animal shelter. One thing I like about her is that I’d read that guinea pigs are generally happier with guinea-pig company, but she’s at the shelter because she doesn’t get along with other guinea pigs, and I’d prefer to start with just one guinea pig.

I am wondering if you have any experience with guinea pigs, especially if it’s guinea pig + cat experience.

I just changed my BlogHer profile because I no longer have kids in the 3-5 age group: Henry turned 6 this past Friday. I find I’m most riveted by the ages of my eldest and my youngest: I can’t believe he’s 14! I can’t believe he’s 6! Henry will start FIRST GRADE in three months, and Rob will start HIGH SCHOOL.

The caboose child is particularly poignant/weird because there are so many things to say goodbye to. Getting rid of the baby clothes, and then the exersaucer and baby swing, and then the crib, and then most of the toys—ack. It’s part painful, part awesome: I do enjoy getting rid of Henry’s too-small clothes instead of storing them in boxes, but it can be a little challenging to get rid of a particular t-shirt or whatever. Some of it I hand down to my niece and nephew, which is pleasing. And I have one box labeled “Baby Clothes I Can’t Bear to Part With” to handle a few things: the pink/blue hats with ears the twins wore when they were newborns, the Baby Dior side-snap onesie I found in a mixed-lot of side-snap onesies at a consignment shop when I was expecting Rob, etc.

I feel a little bit like I’m only as young as my youngest child, and that as Henry gets older I’m finally Really Aging. When I had a newborn and/or a toddler, I felt like I must still be pretty young; I feel the same when I see other women with newborns and toddlers. But if my youngest is 6, well. And that’s going to get weirder every year.

I find I’m getting some of the same half-delusional nostalgia that I disliked hearing about when I was deep in the Very Little Kid stage. I see a woman out with a cute-talking toddler and a tiny squeezy baby, and I know to only THINK the “This is the BEST TIME” thought instead of saying it; I say it only with LOVE-EYES. I hope I can continue to remember to silently channel that feeling into giving affectionate/tolerant looks to the parents struggling with the tantruming toddler and the screaming baby. Because it’s only sort of the Best Time, and also it’s the Worst Time.

There are a bunch of things I haven’t had to do for a long time, and I don’t miss any of them:

• I haven’t had to deal with a diaper blowout, or pull a onesie down over someone’s torso to avoid getting something unspeakable in someone’s hair.
• I haven’t had to deal with ANY diapers, in fact.
• I haven’t had to clean barf off the many surfaces of a crib.
• I haven’t had to give anyone a bath.
• I haven’t had to give anyone a bath and then immediately afterward deal with a diaper blow-out and spit-up in the hair.
• I haven’t woken up in an exhausted stupor to the sound of a baby starting to cry in the middle of the night, or at 4:30 a.m.
• I haven’t been awake in the night with a baby who won’t go to sleep, feeling like I’m losing my mind.
• I haven’t had to do much more at bedtimes than three sets of teeth and one set of stories; everyone does their own pajamas and pottying and climbing into bed and turning off the lights.
• I haven’t had to worry about whether the coffee/wine I’m drinking or the food I’m eating or the medicine I’m taking will affect a child.
• I haven’t felt Ruined Naptime Despair.
• I haven’t had to worry about electrical sockets or wires or tiny things on the floor.
• I haven’t had to wonder if it’s an ear infection or is it teeth or is it crabbiness or is it indigestion or is it a virus or is it a diaper pin or WHAT.
• I haven’t had to feel like if I looked away for ONE SECOND there would be a disaster.
• And I hardly EVER have that “NO ONE TOUCH ME EVER AGAIN” feeling.

I’m at the stage where every school day involves a chunk of time where I am alone in the house or alone to run errands. And I can leave the house by myself sometimes even when the children are home. I can make appointments without also needing to figure out a babysitter. And do you know, my big kids get themselves up in the morning, put themselves through the shower, get themselves dressed, make their own lunches, gather up their own stuff, and present themselves to the school bus? Imagine that!

It’s not, though, that THIS is the Best Time. I DO sometimes miss the littler-kid stage and the littler-kid issues. Some days I feel like I am really happy that one of my biggest fears is College Costs rather than SIDS. On the other hand, my biggest fear isn’t College Costs: it’s that the child will do something that results in his whole life being destroyed/over. So. I’m not sure that’s an improvement, per se. And there’s this dawning realization that for all my “I’ll be so relieved when we’re past the SIDS window” and “I’ll be so relieved when everyone in the house can have the age 3+ toys,” there is ALWAYS more to worry about.

Plus, you know how as soon as a baby/child outgrows something difficult, there’s a fresh difficult thing right after it? So that ANY time you’re thinking, “Things will be better as soon as he/she is past this stage,” it ALWAYS turns out to be a complete trade-off, with new bad parts taking the place of the old bad parts, and, luckily, new good parts taking the place of the old good parts? THAT keeps going, TOO. Yay, we’re done with the tantruming; crud, now it’s whining. Yay, we’re done with the whining; crud, now it’s backtalk. Oh, sad, I just realized he doesn’t smell like a baby anymore; yay, he can be trusted to stand next to the car for a minute while I load groceries! Oh, sad, I can’t really carry him anymore; yay, he’s going to school and I have less of that cyclical “This isn’t a year, it’s just one long 8,760-hour DAY THAT NEVER ENDS” feeling.

I am looking for that excellent blend of reassurance and information that I think of as one of the best parts of the blogging world. Sure, I suppose I could ask all my local friends and acquaintances one by one what they know about X, but that would take ages—and, statistically speaking, few of them would have any information. OR, I can ask HERE and have instant access to THE GREATEST MINDS OF OUR GENERATION (please resist madness/starving/hysteria kthanx).

Okay! So do you remember when I wrote about children and instruments? After that, with my mind tidied and bolstered from the aforementioned reassurance/information, I signed both Rob and William up for piano lessons. Ahhh, the relief of TAKING ACTION after months of fretting! Why didn’t I do this MUCH SOONER?

…And that’s right about the time the panic set in. Wait: WE HAVE NO PIANO. How will they PRACTICE?

You may be looking at me right now with an expression of incomprehension and disbelief, wondering how did this HAPPEN? Who would arrange for piano lessons without having a piano? Who DOES that? But wait! You should hear my side before you wonder if it’s time to up my fish oil or what. Follow my pattern here: I signed Rob up for clarinet lessons, and then after that we acquired a clarinet. I signed William up for trumpet lessons, and then after that we acquired a trumpet. I signed Rob and William up for piano lessons, and then…OH CRAP.

It’s been NORMAL to first consider the lessons, and then acquire the necessary instrument. BUT PIANO IS DIFFERENT. Piano is not in the “Oh, let’s contact Uncle Music [my musical brother, who has made it his personal mission to acquire instruments for my children] and thus acquire this instrument!” category. Even if pianos were FREE, I would not WANT one at this stage of things. *panicked panting*

Okay. So this is where I turn to you. Because for all I know, this is UTTERLY TYPICAL. Maybe almost NO children who take piano lessons have pianos at home! Maybe the piano teacher would be surprised if we DID have a piano! Maybe it is absolutely typical for schools and piano teachers to have…some other solution to this. I’d been thinking, “Oh, they can practice on our keyboard,” but do you know how many keys our keyboard has? THIRTY-SIX. Do you know how many keys a piano has? EIGHTY-EIGHT. This solution is NOT GOING TO WORK.

I am trying to calm myself with thoughts such as: “Okay, okay, everything will be fine. AT WORST, we cancel the piano lessons, cancel the class Rob is taking next school year and find something else for him to take among the remaining scraps of unsigned-up-for classes, and I’ll feel completely embarrassed and foolish in several directions.” (It is not a very helpful thought.)

I am having a week month year life bit of a “Humans are not a very good species, at all” episode. At the grocery store, a stranger in line repeatedly reprimanded Henry, and I wondered what people like that think they’re doing. Like, they obviously don’t see themselves as being startlingly interfering and rude and all up in someone else’s business unwelcome and uninvited, so how DO they see themselves?

It gave me flashbacks to my mother-in-law, who thought she was benevolently helping others lead happier lives—and, if they declined her advice as not being The Obvious Only Right Way For Every Single Person To Live, she rolled her eyes and threw up her hands at their stupidity and ingratitude. In what way does that variety of ovary GROW in a person, and in what way does it continue to thrive?

Then, I was telling the children wearily for the millionth time that it is NOT NICE to mock and tease and make other people mad for fun, and then while I was cooking dinner I was wondering why we bother to tell them this, considering it seems like most people grow up anyway to mock and tease and make other people mad for fun, and at that point there’s no parent to tell them to quit it. All the scornful “Who DOES that??” and “Who THINKS that??” and “Who LIKES that??” and “Who CARES about things like that??” (with the implied answer “Clearly only a STUPID IDIOT”) is wearing me down. OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, THAT’S WHO. And yet it can also be so fun, and so comforting to find others who feel the same way about something, and so bonding in a very human “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” way.

As it wears me down and simultaneously comforts me when _I_ do it (ahem). I can’t believe how many people cut me off, or swerve around me when I’m stopped for a pedestrian, presumably because they thought I was just stopped in the road for no good reason. I can’t believe how many people leave bitchy comments, apparently thinking that’s okay to do. I can’t believe how many people sigh loudly in checkout lines, as if that does anything but bring morale down. I can’t believe how many people enjoy hanging out at websites like People of Walmart, where the only point is to mock and be mean. It’s so reassuring to find other people who feel the same way I do about people who are not living The Obvious Only Right Way For Every Single Person To Live. Who DOES that? Who THINKS that? Who LIKES that? OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, THAT’S WHO.

Also, in giving Rob some lessons in dealing with other humans, I was reminded that there are SO MANY TIMES when another person is acting awful (for example, two people disagree but one of them spins the other’s position insultingly and unfairly and as evidence of poor character, rather than seeing it as a disagreement), and there is NOTHING THAT CAN BE DONE except to go about your business and let them go about theirs. EVEN WHEN THEY ARE COMPLETELY WRONG AND ALSO THINKING MEAN AND UNFAIR THOUGHTS ABOUT YOU. Even if you COULD change that one person’s mind, there are THOUSANDS OR MILLIONS OF OTHERS THINKING THE SAME WAY.

And I read A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, and it reminded me why I originally formed my theory (since disproven) that I didn’t like books written by men. I don’t want to read a grown man thinking thoughts about a teenaged girl. I don’t want to read how he hates his wife and children. I don’t want to read about how often he thinks about cheating on his wife, or how depressed and burdened and bored he feels by his house and family and job. I especially hate it when Paul recommends books to me and they have these thoughts in them, because then I wonder if he identifies with this point of view or if he just brushed past it the way I do if I read a book where a woman fantasizes about shoes: I don’t relate to that particular aspect, but I don’t really notice it or think it represents All Women.

…Although, actually, that’s a terrible example, because I DO notice it and I then DON’T like the story because I DON’T identify. Well, anyway, that’s pretty much exactly why it got me upset. I felt similarly when Paul and I were first dating and he recommended Robert Heinlein books. Ah, Robert Heinlein. So much talk about how stupid monogamy is and how glorious the human existence could be if women didn’t keep being so ridiculous and jealous over the innocent and healthy joy of a man sleeping around. Maybe not the ideal book recommendation for a new girlfriend.

Things are looking up a bit this morning, though. I have made a batch of fudge, and I’ve started a book I thought I wouldn’t like but so far I like it a LOT: in just the first chapter, I laughed OUT LOUD (and I was the only one home, so it wasn’t even “I want you to know how funny I find this book” laughter) three times and cried once.

(photo from Amazon.com)

EVERYTHING ABOUT this book says I wouldn’t like it (and maybe soon I won’t). It’s exactly the kind of book I tried about a dozen of before completely giving up on the whole Ladies’ Fried Coffee Diner Quilting Club Sisterhood genre. The title falls exactly into that category: The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can Eat. The jacket description does, too: a group of women with cute group nickname meet every week at a diner, “through marriage, children, happiness, and the blues.” I don’t understand why I picked it up or why I checked it out (I think it was partly because it was a group of THREE women, not the OMG ALWAYS group of FOUR), but I did and I did, and it’s cheering me up considerably. (Though also reinforcing things, as one character refuses to acknowledge or accept another character’s second wife. Sigh. Who DOES that??)

We are trying to figure out what to do about the kids and musical instruments. Instruments seem to fall into a category like diets and psychiatric medicine: there never seems to be a point where everyone agrees it’s not working and you can give up. Instead, it’s “He just hasn’t found the right one for him!” and “He just needs to give it more time!”

William first tried clarinet, since he didn’t really care what he tried first and we already had the clarinet Rob chose at that age. It sounded terrible all year, making me re-regret not making Rob keep going with it awhile longer, since Rob made it sound pretty within a week of practicing BUT OH WELL BYGONES. William said he didn’t mind instruments per se, but that the clarinet was not right for him: he didn’t like the sound of it (ORLY??).

So this year he tried trumpet. It’s been “like clarinet, but louder.” After his band concert last week, I asked if his teacher had given the class any feedback on the performance. He said yes, and that she’d had a video of it for them to see. He said, “Unfortunately, the video was really bad quality”—and I said, “Er, I’m not sure that was the fault of the…” just as he said “NO, NOT BECAUSE OF THAT. IT WAS STATIC ON THE RECORDING.” Well. I’m just saying.

Playing an instrument is such a well-rounded thing to do. And I like the idea of them being in band. (Yes, I’ve seen that article!) And it seems like it would be very nice on a college application. But when do we say “This is not only a constant struggle but also a constant torment. He is just Not Musical. Music is just Not His Thing, and that is Just Fine”? Not everyone does art; not everyone dances; not everyone builds furniture; not everyone likes camping; not everyone does well with math; not everyone picks up foreign languages; not everyone has a feel for motors and engines. It seems like music actually falls into THAT category instead: things some people have an aptitude for, and others don’t. We all think our own specialties are crucial for human fulfillment—but we can’t all do everything.

Now Rob is giving it a second shot. He’s starting high school this year, and the school requires a year of either music or art, and he’d prefer music. I tried to persuade him to go back to clarinet (we ENJOYED hearing him practice! ENJOYED it!), but he says it just isn’t his style. So he’s trying keyboard/piano, and we’re going to get him lessons all this summer so he has at least SOME experience before he starts—and also so that if it’s a total bust, maybe there will be time to switch to chorus or art instead.

One thing we’re considering is getting William piano/keyboard lessons TOO. This could perhaps cause some healthy competition. Or it could backfire and make the one who doesn’t do as well give up.

• Waking up half an hour before you have to get up, needing to pee too badly to sleep comfortably. But if you get up to pee, you won’t be able to go back to sleep for the remaining half hour.

• Someone (maybe a spouse, maybe not) didn’t listen carefully to the problem you described, and then got annoyed because you weren’t interested in their proposed solutions to the unrelated problem they think you described.

• Websites that were apparently set up by a company that thought, “Hey, we should have a Web Site!”—and then chose a setter-upper who was completely unfamiliar with websites. So for example, a button that says “Sign up for summer camp now!” is not a link. And when you do find the summer camp description, under “Course Descriptions,” it’s the 2012 schedule. And when you email the “email for more information” person to find out when the 2013 summer camp info will be up, they forward it to someone else because they don’t handle the email, and the person they forward it to tells you it all looks right to them: all you have to do is click “Schedule 1” on the pull-down menu and then the dates of the summer camp will show up! (It turns out that to get to “Schedule 1” you have to completely fill out the registration form for yourself and your child and also check boxes saying you agree to all the policies of the company including payment schedules.)

• EBay seller keeps listing the same item over and over, so it keeps appearing in your search results over and over. It doesn’t hurt anything, so there’s no reason to be annoyed. BUT WHY DO THEY KEEP LISTING IT? NO ONE WANTS TO BUY IT.

• The way I type “eBaby” almost every single time.

• A big company won’t make clothes for people who aren’t thin. Same as almost all the other companies.

• An email from an online store, telling me that maybe I’d like to look again at some clothes I looked at yesterday, and showing pictures of everything I looked at. That’s annoying AND creepy.

We went to a middle school band concert (William “plays” trumpet), and what surprised us was how enjoyable it was. Though WAY TOO LONG. Dear heaven, sitting on bleachers for an hour and a half listening primarily to OTHER people’s children (the sixth graders played for the first ten minutes and then mercifully went to the bleachers; the rest of the performance was 7th and 8th graders) play instruments at a middle-school level is TOO MUCH. Half an hour was what I would have considered the absolute limit, and if that means splitting it up over several nights, then SPLIT IT UP. No, I don’t care how much trouble that is. I watched OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN play instruments for an hour and twenty minutes.

There were two reasons we would call the event “enjoyable,” even though if you’ve heard a typical middle-school student practice an instrument you will find the concept of enjoyment incompatible with reality. The first reason is that parts of it were extremely funny. There is bad playing, and then there is BAD PLAYING. The band leader is conducting, the children are looking earnest with their shiny and expensive instruments, the audience is in their seats—and the ASTONISHING BADNESS of the playing made us squeeze our fingernails into our palms to keep from laughing. And parents are RECORDING it: phones are held aloft to preserve this special moment! We were pink and bright-eyed with the effort of suppression. Well worth the whole evening.

The second reason it was enjoyable was that some of the later playing (not the part with our child) was actually GOOD. Well, to be fair, Paul and I disagreed on this. There’s an elite, by-audition-only 7th/8th grade band segment that the band teacher astutely allowed to play for most of the performance, and I thought they did a really good job, to the point that I was glad to listen to them. I said so to Paul, who said “Eh” and put up a horizontal hand of eh-ness. I also enjoyed seeing one of Rob’s friends play: he’s one of these multi-talented kids who’s confident and good at everything and is nevertheless very appealing. And there was an 8th grade girl on bass guitar who was clearly aware of the coolness of being a girl playing bass. And it DID make me think “Hey, if William keeps practicing, maybe HIS playing could be enjoyable TOO!” So I guess I see what they did there.

The children and I were talking about allowances. Their contention as usual was that everyone gets more allowance than they do. I was explaining to them that different families handle money in different ways. For example, maybe their friends get twice as much allowance, but their friends are expected to buy more of their own stuff, or have to buy their own hot lunch at school if they want it. Or maybe their friends get less allowance, but their parents will buy them the shirt they like or give them a quarter for the gumball machine. And different families have different amounts of flexible income, and different ideas about how much flexible income a child should have. It can be really hard to compare.

Also, big-allowance stories get over-represented in the child’s mind. It reminds me of Tooth Fairy stories, where “everyone” gets $20 per tooth—and then it turns out it’s one kid, and that his family does $20 for the FIRST tooth and not for ALL teeth, and a quick Facebook survey shows that pretty much every other family does $1/tooth like we do, or maybe $2 or $5 for the first tooth and then $1/tooth after that, and ALL the parents thought they were being cheap compared to other parents because ALL the kids are talking about the $20/tooth kid. (This is a benefit of having plenty of parent friends.)

The kids thought it would be a good idea to do an allowance survey on the blog. But I can’t just do a poll for it—not only because of all the different ages involved, but because there are too many variables. One family might think $10/week is the right allowance for an 8-year-old, but they have her pay for her own ear-piercing, and for the presents she brings to birthday parties. How does that compare to the family that gives their 8-year-old $1/week but the dollar is pretty much exclusively for candy because everything else is paid for by the parents? Or maybe one teenager gets no allowance because she has a part-time job, and another teenager gets $15/week because she’s in half a dozen extracurriculars and her parents would prefer she concentrate on those right now?

So multiple-choice won’t work; it’ll have to be an essay question. At our house, allowance starts at age 6: one of the birthday gifts that year is a bank with 50 cents in it, and then he or she gets 50 cents a week. (Their allowance isn’t tied to their chores, but if they want more money they can earn it by doing some of MY chores. The hope is that this will firmly plant in their brains the idea that if you want money, you ask for work rather than asking for money.) At each birthday from then on, there’s a raise:

Age 7: $.75/week
Age 8: $1.00/week
Age 9: $1.25/week
Age 10: $1.50/week
Age 11: $2.00/week
Age 12: $2.50/week
Age 13: $3.00/week
Age 14: $3.50/week

That’s as far as we’ve gotten; we’ve been winging it year by year as Rob gets older. Once we tried a system where he got a larger allowance but had to put some in savings and some in charity, but OMG it was such a huge headache/hassle. (The biggest issue: what was the savings…FOR? That is, at what point was he allowed to spend it? Or was he just supposed to save indefinitely?) We did it for two years with him, then gave it up; by then William wanted to try it, so we let him do it for one year and then we all agreed to drop it permanently.

The whole subject came up this time because Rob is now older than Paul and I were when we stopped getting allowances, so we’re feeling like we don’t have much to base our decisions on. When I was 13, I was babysitting; Paul had a paper route. We had a lot more spending power than Rob has, but Rob doesn’t have the same job options we had, and we wondered if instead we should raise his allowance. On the other hand, Rob doesn’t have the same expenses we had, either: I paid for my own haircuts/perms, my own make-up, school lunch if I wanted it, presents for friends’ birthdays, family gifts at Christmas, equipment/food for my goldfish, etc. And it was the days of feathered hair, so hairspray alone was enough to keep a teenager poor.

Rob might not NEED as much money. He uses his allowance to buy snacks at the school snack bar, and school lunch if he wants it more than the once a week we’ll pay for, and candy. He’s just this year started going to school dances, and we split the cost of the ticket with him (it’s $8, and “more than a week’s allowance” seems to me like the right amount for him to pay, while “more than two weeks’ allowance” seems like too much). He also pays the difference if he wants something that costs more than I’m willing to pay (like when he wanted the Nird shirt), but that comes up very rarely (he still doesn’t care much about what he wears, and doesn’t mind Target clearance stuff). If he wants more money, he can earn it by doing some of my chores (he doesn’t get paid to do his own chores); we also generally pay him when we have him babysit his siblings.

One reason Paul and I have been talking about raising everyone’s allowance is that we’ve had the same system in place since Rob was 6, and maybe 50 cents isn’t quite the same now as it was 8 years ago. The other reason is that we’re noticing that our kids pretty much never save up for anything: they mostly spend all their money the week they get it. We’re wondering if that’s because they don’t get enough money to feel like there’s any point saving it: if it would take over 2 months of not-spending-a-single-penny in order to save $10, does an 8-year-old have that kind of patience? We’re thinking no. On the other hand, we’re already a little uncomfortable with how much candy they can buy with their current allowances; if we raise it and it turns out they STILL blow it all on candy, we won’t like that.

And we also have to keep the family’s income in mind. After Henry and the twins have their birthdays in the next month, we’ll be giving out $8.50/week in allowances—$442.00/year. That’s not a tiny amount, and that’s with three kids at the littlest-money end of the spectrum. It’s worth it if they’re learning valuable lessons about money, but it’s hard to tell if they ARE. And in the meantime, it’s a lot of money being frittered away.

[Edit: Because it’s coming up a lot in the comments, I’ll add that they don’t get money from relatives. This is another bone to pick at our house: “Sophia got TWENTY DOLLARS from her grandmother for EASTER!!” “Jacob’s grandpa gives him a $2 bill EVERY TIME HE COMES OVER!!” “Abby’s aunt gave her TWENTY-FIVE dollars for kindergarten graduation!!” Etc.]