When my oldest son was about five, we launched our allowance system that incorporated four piggy banks. Taking a cue from Dave Ramsey, we set up piggies for long-term savings, short-term savings, spending money, and charity.
That system served us well for eleven years. My youngest son just joined the allowance crowd (as his older brother is about to turn sixteen and, God-willing, find a “real” job), and it was time to overhaul the system.
For my children’s spending habits, short-term savings and spending money overlap, so we’ve consolidated things into a three-bank per child system, at least until the oldest needs his own checking account.
Our collection of piggy banks is a motley crew of plastic and ceramic swine. We’ve got a heavy-duty stream train engine, Star Wars characters, giant Crayon-like metal canisters, fragile gift banks, hand-me-downs, credit union plastic pigs, and homemade banks.
I never considered buying banks. For the most part, we’ve just accumulated them over the years. We’ve filled the gaps with banks made from baking powder, flavored milk powder, and oatmeal canisters.
As we culled the pig collection, I eliminated a few homemade banks that had outlived their usefulness and were not needed in our streamlined system. Into the trash went the store-brand rolled oats container covered in yellow paper and decorated with my pathetic stick figure rendering of a pig.
The owner of the “classic” bank wasn’t on hand, but his sister protested that it was a “childhood treasure” that shouldn’t be thrown away.
Not the sentimental sort myself, I left it in the trash.
Later, the owner of said “childhood treasure” heartily agreed with his sister and retrieved the pathetic piggy bank from the trash. “I remember making that with you,” he said.
I don’t. Not really. I know we did it together, as I’ve done hundreds of seemingly meaningless little tasks with my kids over the years. Only on their end, they apparently aren’t meaningless.
These throwaway “crafts,” if you can even dignify them with that moniker, were investments. Not of the piddly coins dropped in them but of treasured moments spent between a mother and child.
Like thousands of other mundane tasks from diapering to playing make-believe, neither of us may recall the details. But we recall the love.
To all the parents of little ones endlessly feeding those piggies by listening to terrible knock-knock jokes, enduring potty training, singing lullabies until you’re hoarse, or molding snakes out of Play-Doh, your time is not wasted. It’s a deposit, an investment in perhaps the most important job you’ll ever be tasked with. Almost sixteen years out from the birth of my first baby, I’ll bet it’s an investment neither one of you will regret.
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You are exactly right. My twins are 32 and my youngest is 27, and I’m astounded at the things they remember and attach importance to. I was going to discard an old comforter, and when they found out, there was outrage. They told me they loved that quilt because every time they were sick I made them a bed on the couch and covered them with it.
Yes, that’s just the kind of things that surprise me too.