I'm complaining about money in America again.
There's this assumption, in America, that anyone has enough money to do anything, if you just budget correctly--that having enough money for something is a matter of character, not simple math. If you can't afford new shoes for your kid, it's obviously because you got too many coffees at Starbucks or have three fancy cars in the driveway.
This is a lie.
In order to afford eight people and a bunch of pets and one vehicle in a decent neighborhood on one income, we gotta leave some stuff out. People don't understand that.
Just in the past day, Francie has bawled about (1) not being able to go to the school skating party (2) not being able to get anything at the book fair at school.
The skating party costs three dollars. In theory. In reality, three kids plus one adult means twelve dollars, and we didn't have much gas in the car because we were waiting until Fred got paid to gas up (we had enough to get to school and the other really close stuff), so putting ten dollars worth of gas in the car to get to the skating rink, too, means the skating party actually would cost twenty-two dollars total.
The Scholastic book fairs are a yearly money stress for me. The kids are SOLD these book fairs, in the classroom. The kids are actually taken to the book fair as a class, during school time, and told to make "Wish Lists," which they then bring home along with a Book Fair Catalog. Francie, in kindergarten, can't write yet, but someone helped her make her Wish List. (By the way, I've been collecting books for years. We have lots of books at home that the kids have never even read. And the Book Fair sells stuff like erasers and books that come with pocket organizers or hair decorations, and those are what the kids really want the most.)
Naturally, Francie cried when I told her I had not budgeted for the book fair. Who can blame her?
Okay, if I gave each kid five bucks for the book fair, that's only fifteen dollars. But that never happens. Everyone always finds some wonderful item they are DYING to have, and it happens to cost $8.95, which is just a few dollars more than $5.00, after all, and can't I have a cute pencil and eraser, too?
So figure $10 each, minimum, for the book fair. That's $30, if we did it.
I also got an email reminding me that we haven't signed up for our local adoption group event, which happens to be held at our church next weekend. It suggested that we really need to attend, because so far only six families had signed up, and the organizers had taken a lot of time and trouble with it. But, it costs ten bucks for each adult, and five for kids. Sounds fairly cheap at first, but if Fred and I both go and take the three girls, that's $35.00 for a three-hour event. Amelia would enjoy it the most, so I could just send Fred and Amelia for $15, but that's silly because Francie is the one who's adopted, and it IS an adoption group event . . .
No wonder I put off sending in the registration so long . . .
So, in just 24 hours, I ended up with the possibility of paying an extra $87.00 for stuff that I had not budgeted for, which all sounded quite reasonable and not really all that expensive, individually. But geez, stuff like that comes along every other day. It can really add up. Tomorrow there will be more stuff that the kids have been told they really need to participate in.
I guess a lot of the problem is how many people we have in our family. If you just had one kid, the same items would have added up to $51, even considering the gas for the car and signing both parents up for the adoption event.
It's hard for the normal, 1.3 child world to understand, but we gotta draw the line somewhere.
