In case I haven't mentioned it before in too many places, I have a 10 year old daughter. Like most children her age she has a somewhat cavalier attitude about Christmas and gift giving. The better to give than recieve hasn't really sunk in yet. She also has a penchant for losing money that she is given to go shopping with. To help her keep a handle on her gift shopping this year, my wife and I decided that instead of giving her a wad of bills to go forth and spend we would instead give her a Visa Debit Giftcard. When we popped the card on her and told her the amount she had to spend I thought she was going to pop. The idea of a *credit* card was almost overwhelming to her. She was told up front that the card was for buying presents for other people, not herself. But after Christmas, whatever was left she could use however she liked.
She did pretty good using the card, and it was fun seeing the expressions on clerks faces when a child plopped down a piece of plastic and then signed the receipt.
There was only one down moment while shopping, my wife mentioned wanting to grab a tag from an Angel Tree and Alida went crazy. It was really quite embarassing and dissapointing because we've tried our hardest teach her not to be a greedy wench. Time passed and we never made it to the Angel tree which was quite dissapointing.
Wednesday night she brought home a note from school. (She goes to a small Christian school.) The note stated that after Christmas, three of the teachers were going on a mission visit to an orphanage in Peru. The school had a list of items needed by the orphans and staff. Any clean and in good condition items would be greatly appreciated. They also needed suitcases to take the items down with them. Alida asked if we could give some things to the orphans. We said of course we could. We had missed the Angel Tree so this would make up for it. The first thing she did was run up to the bathroom and grab one of her un-used toothbrushes and said "here, they can have this".
No we told her. For something like a toothbrush it really should still be sealed in it's wrapper. My wife then went on to add that if my daughter wanted to, she could take whatever was left on her gift card and buy things for the orphanage. Alida thought it was an excellent idea. They made plans to go shopping on Thursday night. Before going shopping my wife called the card company to find out the available balance. It was a decent amount. So off they went. List in hand.
They started doing some serious power shopping. A short time into the jaunt, it started to sink into Alida's head that she wasn't going to be able to buy some of everything on the list before running out of money. At that point my wife stepped in and said that whatever they had that was more money than was on the card she would pay for. That assuaged Alida just a bit.
They picked up packs of underwear, socks, t-shirts, sweatshirts, all sorts of things. When they got to the checkout the clerk started ringing things up. It took every cent of the $98 that was still on the card and quite a bit more to pay for everything in the cart. When they got back home, we packed everything into a suitcase we didn't use anymore to send it off to school. My daughter went to bed feeling very good about herself and the Christmas Season.
Topic: I have the most amazing daughter! (Read 5017 times)