Now that Stink has embarked on his senior year of college and Sister #2 often has to social work on the weekend, I’ll be spending a lot of Saturday afternoons with Jaycie and Max.

It’s gonna be so rad. I recently discovered that little kids love money, and they love it so much that they will do chores to get money. Plus kids are a hell of a lot cheaper then a cleaning service. This alone is reason to have a bucketload of children.

This weekend when the kidlings descended upon Supergenius HQ, I immediately enlisted their services in helping clean up the joint. They were not too keen on the idea of spending Saturday afternoon cleaning Aunt Jodi’s dusty, cat-hair covered hovel. But then I told them how if they helped out not only would I give them each $5, I would take them to Target to spend that $5.

I think I actually saw Max’s eyes turn into dollar signs.

It was totally worth $10 bucks to have someone put away and rearrange all my fiction books. Plus, I like to think it was a bit educational what with all the alphabetizing involved. They really enjoyed putting the books away . . . for about seven minutes (these kids are just like me). Throughout the process Max kept telling me how all these books were not going to fit on that shelf, and at one point he turned to me and asked if I had a copy of every book ever made and that maybe I should consider getting rid of some of them (which I did, listening a googob of unread or never to be read books on bookmooch).

Of course there was one flaw in my evil plan, the taking them to Target part. First of all, I had no idea that spending $5 would cause so much angst when it came to making decisions. Should Jaycie get two lipsticks and one lipgloss? Should she get a necklace or that notebook and pink pen?

Oh my.

Plus, having to explain roughly 93,914 times that $3.99 + 99¢ + tax was more than $5 was no fun at all.

But you know what? My books are still all put away and that still rules.