Making Amends

Yesterday at the farmer's market I took the kids and my tote bags and sat in the shade of a sycamore tree all morning passing the time, talking with friends and generally having a lovely morning.

The gal next to us brought her daughter who brought along some baked goods. Those are always hard to resist. I bought some dinner rolls for Willon and I to munch for our snack (Rhetta having her own GF snack lest you think I was depriving her of sharing in our yummy treat). He liked these very much.

Later, as we were chatting with these women, I turned to find him in our chair snarfing a blueberry muffin. I looked at him shocked and asked him if he just took that muffin? He, in blueberry rapture, nodded assent and kept on with his snarfing. I got down face to face with him and explained very carefully the rules of exchange, gave him two quarters to give the ladies, then doled out the consequence.

I told him he'd have to take 50¢ out of his piggy bank when we got home to pay for the muffin, and I took what was left of the muffin away. He seemed completely non-plussed over the whole situation, said he was sorry to the ladies, and went about being cantankerous as usual.

Here I have to say that I mostly gave him that consequence to look good in front of the gals because we have never done anything with the piggy banks. We don't joyfully drop spare change into the kids' hands and have them put it away safe in their little banks like a Norman Rockwell setting. We've not addressed that in our house yet because frankly we rarely have any spare change. I was thinking they had a handful of pennies in each one at best. I kinda thought it was a good way to introduce it however and planned to get them out today and talk about it.

This morning Rob got up early with the kids and blissfully let me sleep in. When I finally did roll out of bed Rob was waiting to tell me this story.

First thing this morning, all on his own, Willon got up, reached to the shelf above his bed, and got down what he thought might be his piggy bank. In was in fact his sister's piggy bank, his being an elephant bank, but that's OK. He dumped it out on the bed and started counting out pennies until he got to the highest number he can count. He put them back in and went out and put it in the mailbox, put the flag up and said, "I'm putting my piggy bank in the mailbox so the mailman can take it to the farmer's market and pay all my bread."