Remember the ending of Toy Story 3? Andy is leaving for college and decides to give away all his favorite toys to the little girl so they will be played with again. He stops by her house to introduce all the toys to her and then Andy plays with her with his toys one last time.
We experienced our own toy story moment yesterday…
We were out driving around to garage sales, which by the way A loves doing with us! He and I have been earning extra money dog walking together so he understood that he had some of his own money to spend if he found something that he wanted. We were at one of our last stops and A hit the jackpot! We found a huge bag full of cars!
My first thought was that more cars was the last thing we needed around our house. But then I spotted a police car among the bunch, I knew A would love to have that one! Then as we started looking through them we saw an ambulance and A found a GARBAGE TRUCK! He is so excited about garbage trucks these days.
Since the whole bag of cars was priced as a set we asked if we could just pick a few to buy. The seller was a twelve-ish year old boy and wasn’t sure what he should do about our request. What came next turned out to be very cool teaching moment. The boy’s mom came over and talked him through the fact that his goals were to get rid of old toys, make some money in the process, and she could tell that A would really make good use of these cars. They went back and forth and came to a price of $0.25 each or five cars for $1.00. Which was perfect because Jesse had just told me that he had $2.00 left in his pocket… so we told A he could pick out ten cars.
A went about carefully choosing his favorites. After the first couple of choices the older boy caught on to what A would be interested in and started searching for ones he knew that A would want. He showed him that the ambulance doors opened and how the dump truck could dump his load. So sweet!
A paid the boy the $2.00 and the boy handed us a bag with the ten cars. A could not be more happy with his purchases! All of his new rescue vehicles have been working non-stop and he is driving his garbage truck around his pretend city making all the truck noises the real garbage truck makes.
What a great lesson for him too! Even at his age it’s clear that there is something very satisfying to have bought the cars with his own money. We really want him to understand the value of working hard and earning the reward. It’s something we’ve been trying to teach him about since he often has a hard time when Jesse has to leave us to go to work. This turned out be the best way so far to illustrate that to A and a great teaching moment for both boys!
Three years later, we can honestly say that the layoff was one of the best things that has happened to us. I don’t think I ever would have been brave enough to be on-board with Jesse leaving a job to start a business, but since that was where we already were… that part was done for us. Jesse had already built up a few good clients from work he was doing on the side so we agreed to take it a month at a time to see if he could maintain steady work.
