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November 03, 2010
Gray Tray
We were told the other day that Monkey's school has this gray tray system at lunch time. Basically if a child does not want his lunch, he can place the undesirable item on the gray tray. Then if some other child finds this item appealing, he can help himself to it.
It sounds very nice for reducing waste.
But we weren't happy when Monkey gave her food away. Sometimes we would save the last bit of a food item (e.g. last banana) for her to take it to school. Had we known that she would give it away, we would have kept the food for us or Rugrat.
Yesterday Monkey forgot to bring her lunch. After school, she said, it was okay that she forgot her lunch because the lunch lady said she could buy lunch and pay the lady the next time.
We told Monkey to use her own money. Lunch costs $2.50 a day.
She did. And she likes school lunch so much that she decided to use the rest of her "spend" money on lunch.
We tried to show her consequences and we did tell her that if she spent all her "spend" money on lunch, she wouldn't have any left to buy toys or books. Monkey just nodded her head.
As it is, Monkey can buy one more lunch, and she plans to do that tomorrow. MonkeyMama asked her what she planned to do when she ran out of money. She said she would wait until the allowance day to get more money. MonkeyMama then asked her what she planned to buy with the new money. Monkey replied that she would it to buy books and toys.
MonkeyDaddy was not happy that Monkey bought her lunch. He felt she should have used the money to buy more meaningful stuff.
But the whole idea of spending money and buying things is quite subjective. At this stage, she spends money on her wants. If Monkey gets great pleasure from school lunch or gumball machines, so be it. It is doubtful that she would mind whatever we have to say.
Posted by Mike at November 3, 2010 05:11 PM
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