Yesterday I was in the car taking Zofran (The name we gave our cute little Zoe. Her middle name is Frances, so we combined the two. Zofran is also a miracle drug that played a key role in my survival through pregnancy with Savvy. Zoe is also a miracle worker herself, so the name suits her quite well.) to a friend's house and I kept hearing Cade screech "Mama, open it!"
I tuned him out as I often do when he uses that screechy tone of voice. A few minutes later I turned around at a stop light to check the situation and found Cade pulling the plastic off the Blue's Clues DVD we borrowed from the library. Mercy. He knew right away he had done something wrong and proceeded to express his apologies.
I thought about this and decided to teach my son the valuable lesson of having to pay for your mistakes. Literally.
So this morning we took the DVD and Cade's piggy bank (a baseball bank really. The piggy bank he owns is a real piggy bank that you have to break in order to get the coins--didn't want to mess with that) to the library. He handed the newly deformed and pitiful case to the librarian and said he was sorry. The lady was kind and accepted it and went "to the back" to check out how much the damage would be. A total of eight dollars. I decided 2 dollars would be fair for him to sacrifice and we began emptying the baseball, taking all the silver coins.
I am not sure if he completely understood what teaching moment I was trying to create, but I know he will remember having to face the librarian and hand her that pitiful case he knew he had "broken."
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