PAYDAY!!!!

I may have mentioned before, there are very large and very different personalities in my house. 

Last Friday was the kids payday....time for allowance.  We used to give it weekly, but in order to teach budgeting, we switched to monthly...man that has been fun.  I think I upped my "Mom, can I have....?" quotient by at least a thousand.

Well last month....not so many chores have gotten done.  I am the kind of employer that only pays for work performed....because we spent so much time riding the crazy train last month I wasn't able to keep as close of track as I usually do.  So I thought I would try a little experiment.  I asked the kids to tell me how much allowance they should get, and they had to justify it to me.  I really wanted to see what their perspective was on how much they had to do around the house.

It went a little something like this:

MOM:  Tell me how much I should give you and why.

SAVANNAH

She stood up, went to the basement and closed the door behind her.  Ahhhhhh, thirteen.

NOAH

Per true Noah style, he grabbed a piece of paper, figured out average number of "workdays" in the year, worked it down to an average number of days.  Figured out a daily rate for his chores, then of course, had to work out the most likely percentage of what he had actually done.  After the computations were complete, it came out to $17.61...but he said, "How about we make it an even 17...in case there was an error in my math."  Then he turned to Baylee and said, "You are getting way less than that because you didn't do any chores hardly at all!"

BAYLEE

Baylee looked my square in the eye and said, "Seventeen dollars".  I asked, "Why?".  Her extremely honest reply was, "because Noah said I couldn't get that much."  I must remind myself to ask more specific questions, such as "Tell me how much allowance you should have based on the amount of work you think you did."

CALEB

"I don't really care about allowance mom, I just want a pillow pet."

To be fair to my personalities, I mean children, I won't divulge the amount of allowance they got....except that between Caleb's savings and allowance he did manage to eek out a pillow pet.

Lessons Learned
1. Be specific....be very, very specific.
2. Next....converse with each child individually....I'll save much loudness and time.
3. Keep track so I don't have to ask them.
4. Skip allowance all together and hire them out as child laborers.
5. Skip allowance and make everything they do part of the responsibility of being a family.  Somehow, I don't think 4 and 5 are going to fly.....