When Parker and I went hunting for new basketball shoes for the season, he decided he also really wanted a pair of flashy street basketball shoes. Since he spent all of his birthday savings on a beatbox that he couldn’t really afford, he had no extra cash to splurge on something he really didn’t ‘need’. Plus, Chris was trying to teach him a lesson about managing his money so that when he wanted something he would have the money to buy it. This is all because he had to borrow $80 from his Dad to buy a $185 beat maker. Ugh!
So while we were out, Parker found a cool and stylish pair of shoes on the clearance rack for only $20. Since we wanted to teach him about ‘wasting money’, we told him that until he paid his Dad back for the beat box which he was planning to do by Christmas and work for the $20 to buy the shoes, I was going to hold on to them. But Dad is such a nice guy that he said he’d give Parker the twenty bucks for the shoes if he could get all A’s by his next progress report. Now Parker already had all A’s and one B in Math which is funny since Chris is a high school math teacher, so he really only needed to improve in one subject.
In the meantime, Parker has been dying to wear his new street sneakers and started asking a few men in the church if he could clean their car to raise money to get his shoes out of hock. At one point, one brother said he’d give him $20 to wash his car inside and out. We told Parker there was no way we were going to allow him to get paid for that. In fact, we said that because of all the stuff this brother had done for Parker, Parker should be doing it for free.
However, it just so happened that, Parker’s football coach emailed Chris Wednesday and asked to know Parker’s grade point average for the football awards ceremony coming up. Chris forwarded me the email thinking his latest GPA was still a 3.83, but I decided to go on Parker’s school website to double check for the coach. Neither Parker nor we had any idea that on November 21st his most recent grades had been posted and he had all A’s and one A-.
So of course, we decided to play a trick on Parker. When he got home from BB practice that evening we told him about the email from his football coach. We had our ‘serious’ faces on and told him that we needed to talk saying that I had checked his grades. Chris and I called him into our room and began to lay it on him how he had been slacking during football season. Parker looked worried. I could hardly keep a straight face. I was good to have a little fun with him since he’s the oldest and is always doing these kinds of things to his younger siblings. Chris continued the lecture about grades while hiding the shoes behind his back. Chris pulled out the shoes and Parker shouted, “Yes!” realizing what we were doing.
We all laughed. Parker loved that we got one over on him. And so Wednesday night, he got all snazzy for church and put his new sneakers on almost an hour before church. It was all worth it. Ha!
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