Finished the floors, got to upstairs, did both bathrooms up there, and shelled out $74 to the children for sticks! How could I have known that they’d really get into gear for a nickle a stick? I figured, well, they’ll hang in there maybe, 45 minutes, maybe an hour, and more than 2 hours later, they were all involved, and demanding their pay! And suddenly they were making little noises about how, aawwww, I, the mom, don’t get paid for all my work, and ooowwww, isn’t that saaaad…yeah, dammit, it IS sad. I figured with Speedreader’s pay, he got a bit better than $15 an hour! He’ll be damned lucky to get that with a college education! He’ll be begging me to pick up sticks! I’ve never earned that much! Then, I got to teach the awesome lesson of telling him that the Chick-Fil-A meal we all got for lunch just ate one whole hour of his stick-picking-up-work. Wow. Was he ever astonished. A whole hour? Maybe he didn’t like to eat out all that much afterall…that Fly Pen he got for Christmas? Seven stick picking up hours. The Four Wheeler he thought we’d be stupid enough to look into? 21 stick picking up hours…This has proved to be an unschool lesson worth its weight in gold. He is FINALLY beginning to understand what we mean when we say we want to “stretch our dollar”, or we need to “be mindful and good stewards of what we spend”. Once he had to sweat for it *presto*! he’s suddenly a fiscal conservative.
I once read that the difference in a liberal (and I mean more fiscally here than anything else) and a conservative is that the liberal has nothing to lose, and the conservative has earned something he/she doesn’t want to give up without say in the giving. Makes some sense to me. All I know is that I got more conservative after I saw how much was taken out of the paycheck we’d spent many many life hours earning. Not so unlike Speedreader realizing how many sticks he’d have to pick up for a trip to Lego Land. And I didn’t even issue a 10-99. Happy Income Tax Day, which isn’t so far away.
