One Proud Mommy

I'm going to brag about my precious girls right now. So stop reading if you don't want to hear me go on and on about how proud of them I am right now. I try not to boast but I'm just over-whelmed with joy. Occasionally I wonder if the girls are really learning the virtues that we are trying to instill in them. Today was an instance where I'm sure they are taking it all to heart.

Today I took the girls to Target to buy their Halloween costumes. I told them last week that we were going to do this so they have had an entire week of anticipation leading up to it.

Some history first. For many years, my Mom bought the girls their Halloween costumes. When she lost her job last year, that came to an end. For their early years, I recycled them down to their siblings to get the most wear out of them. But by about 4, they had their own ideas of what they wanted to dress up as. When we started the "Big Purge of 07" last year, I told them flat out that I was not buying them a new costume and they would have to pick from what we had. In fact, we even purged most costumes that I could sell. In addition to Halloween costumes, we also had numerous dance recital outfits. Believe it or not, those are even more expensive than traditional costumes. So we got down to about the girls top 10 favorites and saved those. The girls still enjoy dress up and in fact, would probably do it everyday if allowed to. Now back to this year. A few weeks ago K#2 starting talking about what she wanted to be for Halloween. I really didn't want to spend the money on costumes nor did I know (and still don't know) if we'd be here for Halloween. I came up with a game plan.

I told each of the girls that I would give them $20 towards a costume and proceeded to hand each of them four $5 bills. Then I gave them a few suggestions. Most of the costumes were $35 - $50. There were some for less too. I pointed them all out and showed them how to find the prices. K#2 asked me what I would do. I told her I'd keep the money and use a costume that we already had. But another option would be to pick out something under $20 so that they could afford it or they could do extra work to earn extra money towards the additional expense of the costume that they wanted. Of course K#2 wanted a $35 plus a $9 wig. K#1 immediately said she was keeping her money and would use a purple dress that we have to be a princess. K#2 was very torn. She REALLY wanted to be Hannah Montana. She had it bad. But eventually she choose to skip spending her money. K#3 wanted to spend all of her money. She didn't care about saving it but I did talk her into keeping it like her older sisters were.

We had another opportunity for a lesson during this shopping trip. After this we went over to the kids clothing department. We talked to the girls about Daddy's bonus and how blessed we were that he received it and that it was more than it was supposed to be. I then explained to them about the kids at T$ school and how many of them didn't have uniforms or even socks to wear to school. They were familiar with this type of situation from prior years of doing backpacks for City Mission. I told them that we were using some of Daddy's bonus to buy packs of socks for some of the kids. Then K#1 said she would like to spend half of her money to buy 2 packages of socks and K#2 wanted to buy 1 pack. I was so proud of them! It was a wonderful moment of seeing them put into practice of their own choosing some of the values that we have tried to instill in them. Praise the Lord!