One Pink Hippie

A while ago, I’m guessing 9 months back, we started paying our kids an allowance once a week if they have done their “pay chores”. T gets $2 for taking out the garbage and emptying the dish washer; both jobs I despise so I feel completely at peace paying someone else to do them. J gets $1 a week for sweeping the kitchen every day. Often I forget to pay out on Monday, so when I do remember they get paid for multiple weeks. This coupled with me not taking them shopping very often, makes saving up fairly easy for my little ones. T often has $10-20. Then we go to the store and he buys something that looks exciting in the moment, like a huge jar of cheese puffs at SAM’s Club to share. Usually it isn’t anything he’s been wishing for and planning on. That is until now.

The end of last year, T got a Lego catalog in the mail. He poured over it for days and then came to me to tell me he picked out a set he really wanted. It was a Hobbit spider set, the scene where Bilbo takes on the enormous spiders and saves his companions. The Lego book listed it at $29.99. We sat down at the computer to look at Amazon. It was less, I think $28.99 at the time. He had $20ish and decided he wanted to save up. Boy howdy, am I proud of him. He took a slight detour to buy some paperclips but other than that he stayed focused. He came to me a couple of times with some idea he’s churned up for something smaller he could buy right now. Every time I looked at him and asked if he wanted to save up for his Legos or buy the something new, he looked at me, pondered, and decided he really wanted the Legos.

Last week the price dropped a little more & he was 10 cents short of the $26.44. I fought back the urge to give him a dime and instead asked him what he wanted to do. If he’d asked me for the money, I would happily have handed it over. After a few minutes he looked at Chad who told him to go look around the house, in the sofa and on the dryer. T said it didn’t matter if he found any money because I wouldn’t let him keep it. (The general rule at our house is if you find money laying around he house, it’s Mom’s. We’ve had a lot of mysterious money discoveries that looked an awful lot like swiping.) Chad assured T that he could keep what he found. I nodded. T came up a few minutes later with a fistful of coins. I ordered the Legos and they came on Friday, 1 day earlier than expected. T spent the day setting them up and is so tickled with his first big purchase. I feel like a super hero mom. He’s saved up for something important to him and learned about making sacrifices for what you want. And I did t cave even when he was close.

Tonight my in-laws took C & I out on a double date to a fancy restaurant and a show at the Colonial. Matt Andersen an amazing blues songwriter from Canada. He put on a great show and it was so lovely to sit next to my sugar daddy and watch someone doing something with so much passion. I don’t think of myself as appreciating the blues all that much but boy-howdy did Matt put on a good show. Music is so much richer live.

I used to be such a creative person seeing art in everything. Over the past few years, I’ve let that part of myself slip through the cracks. At first I didn’t notice, but some time in last few months, I dropped the blindfold. I’m ready to take the wheel back and steer. I have declared 2013 as a year of projects, completed projects. So far, I’ve finished a quilt and an afghan. The quilt is the first quilt I ever pieced and quilted. I started it for O in November 2011. Now he has a special blanket to sleep with that is big enough to wrap in generously. Can you tell how much he loves it? I made it only using flannel from my stash and quilted about a 1/4 inch inside the seams. I feel pretty much like a super hero.

I finally finished O’s baby afghan that I started at least 4 years ago. He will be 4 in April. I made an afghan for each of my kids using the same granny square pattern just tweaked a little. T’s is blue and brown, J’s is pinks, O’s is reds and browns. They all have different borders and the squares are joined just a little differently, but they have a congruity all the same.

Right now I’m working on a heart shaped rug out of macramé yarn that I inherited once upon a time. I don’t do much as far as holiday decorating goes, but man oh man I love Valentine’s Day and I loved the idea of having a special rug by my sink during February. Let’s face it, it will probably stay out more often than not. Changing decorations and storing them is just so much work and I don’t have much tolerance in my small space for storing decorations. It’s turning out super cute. I’m planning to take it to the annual Pink & Red party that Jennifer & I throw every V Day as an homage to our friendship and the colors we love.

I have piles upon piles of other projects to finish including kitchen chairs that we started in Aug 2011 when I purged the chairs we’d inherited from C’s folks. I hated them and we haven’t had adequate seating since. The new chairs will stack and be beautiful. They are all cut out just waiting for screws and sealing.

This year I am also taking a stance and hanging things on our walls. We’ve been in our shoebox of a townhouse for 5 plus years now, oh my, almost 6. It’s about time to act like this is our home rather than a dorm room. As soon as I decide on a color for the frame, I’m planning to build a huge inspiration cork board to pin up all the little lovelies that speak to me. I’m going to hang it in my bedroom. Here are a few things on my wish list for other walls.

Emily Rooney Designs. Man! I love the Avett Brothers hard core.

Kelly Place

The Little Illustrator