Parenting Moment

There comes a time when conversations need to happen between a parent and their child, to pass on essential wisdom and knowledge. This morning that moment came again for Robo. The birds and the bees is one such conversation but we've already had that conversation and he kept looking at me with eyes filled with confused amazement and asking, "why are you telling me this?" This morning, however, the conversation was reveal the great hidden concept of the long distance phone call. The fact that they cost money.

We will often send the older siblings, Robo or Kitten, off to the back yard to hang out with the little Bear, so the Bear can run off some steam. To make it seem less like a punishment, we will also allow them to have friends over to hang out with while they are making sure the Bear doesn't eat what ever he finds by turning over rocks by the flower area (a favorite pass-time of his---the turning, not the eating). Sometimes, when the friend can't come over, they will walk around with the cordless phone talking to a friend.

So I didn't think anything of Robo walking around outside talking on the phone while he was with Bear. Until I thought to ask him who he was talking to. He was talking to a friend that he met at the camp-out we had a couple weekends ago. Who lives two hours to the north---in-state long distance which as you probably know is more expensive than state to state long distance. Why couldn't he have just called Florida? Skype, where are you when we need you?

He assures me that he had no idea that when you dial extra numbers to make a call that it would be more expensive than making a call down the street. I assured him that it would, pretty much every time. And I also assured him that this was his one and only learning experience freebee. He had been talking for 20 minutes.

In the meantime, Leemur had crawled into one of the kitchen cabinets and was pushing the drawers out from behind hoping to fool someone into thinking that the house was haunted.