Day 66 (part 2)

Sorry, for­got to include this expense in the pre­vi­ous post:

My Mom — $25.00
Fam­ily. They can really com­pli­cate money mat­ters, can’t they?

Last Sat­ur­day, The Daugh­ter and I stopped in at Tar­get and picked up the new Pink CD as a birth­day gift for my sis­ter. I don’t always buy my sib­lings birth­day gifts; in fact, more often than not I just call and say hello on their birth­days (or, to be hon­est, I call and say happy belated birth­day some­time dur­ing the 3 or 4 weeks around their birth­days). But every few years a gift idea presents itself some­where in the vicin­ity of a sibling’s spe­cial day and I sur­prise the heck out of them with an actual gift. [Not to look like a lousy sis­ter or first-rate cheap­skate here, this is gen­eral fam­ily pol­icy among my fam­ily and one that we’re all com­pletely happy with.] This year a gift idea just hap­pened to present itself a few days before this sister’s birth­day. So we bought the CD.

As luck would have it, the very next day my mom calls and asks if I have plans to give this sis­ter a b-day gift. “Yes”, I proudly report, “we bought her a CD.” “Oh”, says my mom. Uh oh. “Oh” isn’t usu­ally good com­ing from my mom. “Why, what’s up?” I ask. Turns out that she and the other sis­ter have agreed to go in on a series of dog train­ing lessons and do I want in? Ugh. Sud­denly things are com­pli­cated. Two rea­sons; no maybe three.

1. My mom is beyond broke and I know that she will fund this whole ven­ture by her­self if none of us will go in with her even though I know she can’t even afford to think of buy­ing this gift, much less actu­ally doing so.
2. Of course I want to go in on the gift — it’s a nice present that my sis­ter would really appreciate.
3. My sis­ter really, really needs this gift as she and her fam­ily have recently adopted a puppy with the energy of a Taz­man­ian Devil and the size of a small horse.

So now I have a dilemma — do I return the CD? Leave my sis­ter and mom to fund the classes alone? Get both? And if I get both, what about the budget?

Well, you can see from the entry that I cut a check to my mom for $25 — my 1/3 share of the total expense. But what you don’t know is what I decided to do with the CD! Can you guess?

I took the mat­ter to The Daugh­ter. She was, nat­u­rally, dis­ap­pointed. She really wants to give her aun­tie the CD; she knows she’ll love it. First she decides that she’ll buy the CD her­self and send it to her aunt. I point out that her gift bud­get is gone. Then she says she has most of the good songs from it, she could just burn them. But she really doesn’t want to because she knows it’s ille­gal and uneth­i­cal. As a mom try­ing to raise respon­si­ble cit­i­zens, how else can I react to that but with pride? Well, we could give it to her for Christ­mas — except, as The Daugh­ter points out, we usu­ally only send fam­ily gifts, not indi­vid­ual gifts, and we’re all pretty sure that this par­tic­u­lar uncle won’t have much inter­est in a Pink CD.

Well, we finally decided to give her the classes and the CD. That’s pretty much what you get from me — there might be 4 or 5 years of noth­ing but belated birth­day phone calls and then, wham, one year I hit you with a cute greet­ing card, a gift cer­tifi­cate for dog train­ing, and a new CD. Keep ‘em guess­ing, that’s my philosophy!

What would you have done? Any why?

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