The Easter bunny brought my kids wallets this year.
Worst idea ever.
Every time we leave the house, the dreaded wallets come with us.
I have begged and pleaded with my kids to leave the wallets at home, but to no avail. My kids love their wallets because it gives them license to put things into my shopping cart that don't belong there.
"I'm not buying a pellet gun today. Or ever," I told Cortlen earlier this week.
"Fine," he snapped. "Then I'll buy it." He pulled out five one dollar bills from his wallet and waved them around in my face.
"The gun costs $50.00," I pointed out.
Sadly, the only thing left in his wallet was a dime.
All's well that ends well. A few seconds later, he got distracted by display of fluorescent fishing lures and left his wallet on the store shelf.
"You're going to lose all of your money one of these days," I said as I scooped up the wallet.
"At least I have a purse," my daughter said as she swung the object over her head like a helicopter propeller.
"If that thing hits me, there's going to be a problem," I warned.
When my mother-in-law was visiting, the wallets were more visible than normal. This is because my in-laws have a bad habit of giving my kids their spare change after they make a purchase.
"I wish you would leave your purse at home," I told my daughter at least ten times during my MIL's stay.
I didn't even notice that she had it with her when we all went out to eat on Saturday night. Camber realized that she had left the purse at our table a few hours after we got home. I called the restaurant on Sunday morning and they told me that they had it. We all sighed in relief. Camber had close to $40 in the purse, most of it gifted to her by Tim's dad.
We went to pick up the purse at the restaurant on Monday morning. It wasn't a good scene when my daughter opened the wallet and found that all of her money was gone, except for one measly dollar.
There are good and bad things that come from the act of someone stealing money from a child. The good is that my kids finally got why I won't let them keep the random toys and trinkets that they find on the floors of fast food restaurants or the school bus etc. The bad is that for the first time, they saw the world in a different way. It made me sad and a little angry that the veil of innocence has been lifted. The silver lining in this is, of course, that it could have been much worse.
We've been talking about stealing a lot over the past few days (along with pet kangaroos) and have decided that whoever took the money out of Camber's monkey wallet must have needed the money more than she did.
That's the only way an eight year-old can make sense of it.
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