A Whole Dollar

As a family, we were looking through the scrapbooks that Marianne has made over the years. The girls loved it, but as I can relate to, the younger kids quickly got bored with the excessive amount of pictures we'd taken of Ashley, our oldest. For example, my parents had a video camera for many years of their marriage. They first got it when Nathan, the oldest, was a baby. When I was 13 or so, they had all those 8mm videos transferred to video. It seemed to take forever for the video place to finish the job. Finally, the job was done and our whole family gathered together to watch the video. There were hours of footage. This would be so fun! the video started with baby Nathan which was natural but good grief, Mom and Dad sure thought Nathan sitting there was important. Nathan on the stairs. Nathan in the high chair. Nathan laughing. It seemed to go on forever.

Then we had to endure forever with Ethan and then Justin and then Austin. by the time we got to me, not everyone was even in the room because they were so bored. Too bad too because the video of me only lasted five minutes and the video was over. The whole thing was over! I demanded an explanation and Mom and Dad just said, "Our camera broke. Sorry."

I promised I would never do this to my kids, but unwittingly, I have.

"When will we look at pictures of me?" said Abby, over and over. Marianne kept tempting her by saying, "I think this book has pictures of you Abby," or I think this book has pictures of you Paige." Paige didn't really care because she thought each picture of Ashley was actually a picture of her. She thought we'd taken so many pictures of her. How nice of us.

Abby wasn't fooled.

When we did get to Abby's pictures, both Marianne and I commented on how we loved her short hair in the pictures. "You should get a haircut," we suggested.

"No," she said and scowled.

"I'll give you a dollar," I said.

"Okay," she said and panted like a dog like she does when she's really excited. No longer were the picture books so important. Abby was going to get a dollar, a whole dollar.

Ashley wondered if she could get a dollar for a haircut too. No, she couldn't. She looks cuter with longer hair and besides, there are pictures of Ashley in every one of the scrapbooks. Sorry.