Our grade two homework for the weekend was to practice counting money.

The standard, four quarters in a dollar was a tough sell with a blank face staring back at me and no real understanding of a connection to an item we want or need with a monetary attachment.

I decided to have the girls  bring their piggy banks to the kitchen table where we would first, count the contents and while the stacking and organizing was underway, I was setting up a store on our family room bench with price tags connected to the feet of our Barbie collection. Perhaps they resembled toe-tags, the kids would never pick up on this and it was really the only joy I would get from playing with the big-busted dolls.

The Barbies ranged in price from $.04 to $3.05.

I told the girls to place the correct amount of money in front of each Barbie at the morgue and if they were right, we would collect the money and play with the dolls.

Ellie (age four) was careful to count out twenty-six pennies, twenty-one pennies, fourteen pennies as she didn’t understand the value of the other coins other than the one you could add by ones.

Hanna scanned the merchandise. She took a five dollar bill from her piggy-bank and set it on the bench.

She said, “This should cover it.” And off she went to fabricate the world’s longest hallway pipe-cleaner link.

I spent the following ten minutes tearing apart the game I had spent the morning preparing and making correct change.