Jane's First Purchase

We have bought many items for the twins during the past eleven months. Some have been fun purchases (books, toys), and some have been not so fun (diapers, wipes). Although all of the stuff has been for the kids, they have not participated in the buying other than sometimes to be present at the store. But the other day, Jane made her very first purchase. All by herself. Using our money.

I gave her the cable remote to busy her while I went to change Tanner's diaper, and when I came back ninety seconds later, Jane was watching the movie Fred Claus (a holiday classic, to be sure) on OnDemand for the bargain price of $4.99. This required Jane to have gone through an entire series of clicks on the remote to get to the viewing of the actual movie: click the big OnDemand button, click on Top Picks, click on New Movies, click on the movie (maybe even scroll a few movies down first), click on the "buy now" button. I had to laugh when I came back into the room and found her seemingly enjoying her purchase (she had even fast-forwarded the movie to about twenty minutes in—I guess the opening credits were boring her), but as a mean mom, I didn't allow her to continue watching. When Mike came home that night, I asked him if he happened to want to watch Fred Claus. He looked at me strangely and said, "Is this a trick question? Because you know I don't want to watch that dumb movie." And I said, "Yeah, but what if we already own it for the next twenty-four hours?" Regardless, we didn't watch it. I hope Jane enjoyed flushing that fiver down the toilet.

[Before you tell us that we should take the batteries out of an old remote and give that to the kids instead, let me assure you we've tried that. They play with the old remote (or phone, or Palm Pilot, or whatever it may be) for about three seconds before they realize that it's not the real one, it's not the one Mom and Dad use, and it's just not as interesting. Smarties...]