Day 66 (part 2)

Posted on | November 6, 2007 |

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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