Friday, April 05, 2013

Trash Packs In A Trash Bag

Since a few months back, Ace has been telling me about this "wonderful toy" called Trash Pack that his friends brought to school.

Essentially, it is just some teeny "monsters" made of rubber that were put into trash cans. The purpose of the toy is for you to collect all 100 designs of them... and then you could trade with your friends... or you could like stack the cans up and see who can stack higher.. or perhaps you can put the cans far and see who is an accurate good throw and can throw the monsters inside the can...

Sounds like a dam useless piece of toy and a waste of money and so whenever he talks to me about it, I told him he can forget about it as I will never buy a useless toy like this for him. So he kept asking and asking and asking and I just kept saying no....

And then leh he asked me if he could use his money to buy it and I said NO... he is not allowed to waste money on useless things like that and as long as he lived in my house and eat the food bought using our money, we will have a say in things like that. When he is all grown up though, and can take care of himself ,then he will have to make his own decision but for now, he has to listen to us first because now when he is young, we can teach him and guide him about how to make good decisions about his money so that in future when he is grown up, he knows how to manage his money.

He would listen but he would still try to get us to buy him by going "Trash pack!" whenever we saw some and also telling me about who has how many trashies and telling me stories of how much fun the trashies are....

During CNY when we were back in Singapore, his godma brought him out for a day and then  during their time together, she told him that she would give him $50 sing dollars to be put with daddy. If he scored well in his chinese test (at least 75 points and above), then he will be allowed to use the $50 to buy whatever he liked.

Ace was very happy about this 150 dirhams and kept talking about using it to buy Trash Pack...

And finally, after so long.. we came to a point where we could test him on his primary one chinese...

And guess what!? To my surprise, even though I think his chinese sucks, he scored 75 points for his test! Just nice to earn his reward...





He was so happy when he found that he scored 75 points that he was jumping into the air! I must say too that he has come a long way. When we first started studying chinese together, Ace was barely able to read most words... and finally when he could, he was unable to string them together in a proper sentence. His grammar was atrocious and he could not understand a 5 sentence passage enough to answer 3 simple questions about it. I was literally tearing my hair out and vomiting blood whenever he started doing chinese homework.. Now, he can read many words.. and he can attempt to do the comprehension passage himself even though he may not get the answers right all the time..

He even attempted to read chinese comics by himself and because I am aware he is not good in his grammer, I am exposing him to more chinese programmes and also reading more chinese story books to him. Happy to see that all our effort and hard work has bear fruit:)

Guess what :) Godma says even mummy is going to be rewarded.. WITH BUBBLE TEA! wahahahah.

Anyway, after he scored the 75 points, he started to want to go out EVERYDAY because he wanted to get his Trash Pack there and then. We told him that out of the 150 dirhams, he is only allowed to spend 50 dirhams.. and we tried to persuade him to save it up to buy something else but to no avail, he was very firm on buying it and he couldnt wait anymore.

Reluctantly, we brought him to a toy store to pick his present. To my surprise though, while Ace will usually spend all or most of the money he has, he showed constrain... He decided that he will buy the smallest pack available as it is much cheaper and he will keep the rest of the money to buy a book...






Max suggested that he can also choose to donate it and he was willing to go ahead as well.

Anyway, we went to the bookshop but couldnt find anything suitable for Ace and so, we decided to go home..

On our way home, Ace started to tell us about how someone had all the 100 monsters in the trash packs? "So what?" I asked him. I asked him what does having the 100 monsters mean? Does it improve someone's life or their own life?

And then Ace said that he agreed that having the 100 monsters is not a big deal. Perhaps he was seeking approval from me and Max and trying to make us feel better about the 5 Trashies that he bought...  he started to say that he feels that the father who bought the 100 trashies for his son is maybe crazy... "There are so many other things he can spend of instead of buying trash pack for his life!" Ace declared...

Looks like my son is finally getting some money sense!:) wahahahaahhaa!

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