Two And A Half Year Goal
Hello everyone.
Nearly three years ago Xavier was fascinated by sprinkler systems, fire suppression systems, toilets and water treatment plants.
He watched scores of YouTube videos about them. In his watching, he discovered other videos. One of those was an elaborate setup of a fleet of Bruder fire engines putting out fires.
Bruder is a German company that makes quality to scale model toys from dump trucks to combines. Two of these toys caught Xavier's attention: a particular firetruck and a cement mixer.
That Christmas, he chose the cement mixer over the firetruck. However, he never forgot the fire engine. He spoke of it often.
In time, we gave Xavier a list of chores to do. If he did them, and did them well, he got paid. Soon, he was raking in three dollars a week.
Occasionally, we would ask what he wanted to buy with his money. Most of the time he mentioned the fire engine.
We priced the engine. The one he wanted, with the accessories he wanted, ran $85 before taxes.
He kept saving. Every so often he would dip into his savings to buy something else he wanted.
Generally, he spent some money on a Lego kit, which ran between $15 and $25 dollars.
He spent $20 on a hand-held arcade game. He insisted he wanted it no matter how much I tried to talk him out of it.
Xavier's "obsession" with Minecraft drove him to desire the newest Raspberry Pi. It has a faster processor and four times the memory as his older model. He wanted the faster, bigger memory model because the older model simply could not host Minecraft well. It lagged, it locked up after thirty minutes, it had issues rendering graphics.
The new model addressed all those problems, so he was happy to expend $30 to buy the Pi (Dad, who also wanted to test out the new model, subsidized the other $50).
The last few months, however, the firetruck returned as a significant desire. Xavier set his mind on saving up the $85.
One weekend, Xavier wanted to watch a movie which we had to rent from one of the streaming services available to us. We had already watched the movie several times, and to watch it again meant renting it again.
When told, "You watched it three times last weekend. If you want to watch it again, you need to pay the $4 out of your savings" he took pause.
After trying to argue someone else paying the $4, he finally gave in, though not at all happy about it. "I'm saving up to buy the firetruck," he complained.
After that little lesson, Xavier clamped down on spending.
Several more weeks passed and He counted his savings. $86 dollars in his jar.
We ordered the model he wanted online (Amazon.com) and he has waited not-so-patiently these last fourteen days for it to arrive.
We kept track of the order's progress. This morning, the order was loaded on the shipping truck and scheduled for delivery before 8:00 PM. Xavier checked the front porch about once on hour.
About 6:45 PM we were sitting on the couch. I looked over and said "Ding, dong" because he had not checked in nearly two hours. Sure enough, it had arrived.
No matter what presents he gets tomorrow, I do not think any of them will compete with the present he gave himself.