September 2008

Last month, we started giving the big boys an allowance. Tristan and Simon each get $2 a week, paid each Saturday. Simon now thinks of the weekend not as a day without school, but as the day he gets paid. That didn’t take long!

We debated for a bit about whether to tie the allowance to chores. I’ve seen it argued both ways: either you do, and the kids have to do their chores to get paid, or you pay the allowance out of the benevolence of your parental goodness and the chores are something that are done simply as a cost of being a member of the family. In the end, we leaned more toward the latter, but I have already threatened Tristan a few times with withholding part of his allowance if he didn’t do a better job of keeping up with his chores.

At four and six, their chores are fairly simple. They are also things I am not overly fond of doing. Fancy that! Simon is responsible for putting away the cutlery after the dishwasher is run, which happens at least once a day. Tristan is responsible for giving the dog food and water twice a day. They are both responsible for putting their schoolbags in their cubbies, putting their own clothes in the laundry hamper, and cleaning up after themselves if they’ve made a particularly spectacular mess (art projects come to mind.) I’m working on getting them to clear their breakfast dishes, too. And they’re on the hook for assignment of random chores, too: bring this basket of laundry upstairs, shuck this corn (that was a fun one!), go entertain your baby brother for two minutes while mommy finishes this blog post. So far, they’ve not only endured their chores without complaint but have actually said they like their assigned tasks. I’m obviously not working them hard enough!

The tricky part has been letting them spend their money on whatever they want. To me, the allowance is as much about introducing money management as it is about chores. So far, Tristan has spent the entirety of his allowance each week on Pokemon cards. Sigh. It’s his money, though, and he’s earned it, so we’ve been letting him get what he wants even though his mother is mildly offended by the idea of a universe in which Pokemon exists.

Even though he’s younger, it’s Simon who seems to be more willing to save up for something for a couple of weeks. He’s got his eye on a black cat Webkinz that would cost about two months worth of allowance. We’ll see if he makes it that far. He also said he’s saving for a remote control R2D2 they saw at the retro toy store. It’s only $169. Think he’ll still want it in a year and a half?

How do you work allowance and chores with your kids?

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On Sunday morning, we were driving to meet friends for breakfast and I caught a snippet of a show they were doing about making your own baby food. The guest, whose name I didn’t catch, said something to the effect of “with the state of food safety the way it is, you just can’t trust even baby food makers to be vigilant, so you should make your own instead.”

This rankled me. More maternal guilt, that’s just what we need. And where do we get the ingredients to make our home-made baby food? From the supermarket, of course. The same supermarkets which have recently had e-coli scares with such wholesome foods as tomatoes and spinach. Making your own baby food is a great choice if you have the time and the inclination. You can control the ingredients and, sometimes more importantly, the texture. But it’s certainly not the only choice and I honestly don’t think it’s a lot safer than the commercial options.

Which reminded me that I don’t think I’ve ever told you the story about the first time I made baby food for Tristan, because I too thought it was the best choice from a nutritional and economic standpoint.

I bought a book of baby food recipes for $26, and decided to start with something simple: carrots. Organic carrots, of course. In fact, organic baby carrots, because they were for a baby. I bought two bags, which at the time set me back about seven dollars. I also bought a steamer pot from Ikea for $40. (I still have that pot, and it’s one of my favourites, FWIW.) I prepared one of the bags of carrots by scrubbing them and cutting the ends off. I steamed them within an inch of their lives, for maybe six hours. Okay, I exaggerate, but it was surely close to half an hour of steaming.

I put the carrots in the blender with a tablespoon or so of the reserved water, just as the cookbook recommended, and turned on the blender. The carrot mash was sticking to the sides of the blender a bit, so I used my also newly acquired wooden spoon (I really didn’t do a lot of cooking in those days) to scrape it down a bit. Without turning off the blades. And promptly filled my freshly made organic baby carrots with a healthy dose of splinters.

So I dumped that batch in the trash and washed out the blender and the blades and started all over again with the other bag of carrots. Wash, cut, boil the snot out of them. Put them in the blender. Forget to put the lid on the blender before I hit the “puree” button. Bits of wet carrot splatter everywere, and I mean everywhere. Weeks later, I was finding carrot bits under the microwave and on the underside of the range fan.

In the end, I got about four servings of carrots out of the whole thing. Net cost per serving, excluding the cookbook and the fancy new pot, was $1.75 or so, compared to 67 cents for the jars at the grocery store. You do the math.

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