Working Girl

Julia recently got a job.  She'll be 4 in April, so we figured it was about time to get her to work and become a contributing member of the family.  A friend of ours works for a professor at a local university who is doing some sort of study on young children learning or test taking or something like that.  (This is clearly a friend that Shannon knows better that I do.)  So, she has come over a few times and spends an hour or so with Julia asking her questions, doing puzzles, and testing short term memory.  So far, she's earned 40 bucks!  (I wish I could get paid to take tests.  Especially since taking tests is one of my best skills in life.)  Julia has used some of her money to buy a cash register, which is her new favorite toy.

But things really got interesting when I related all of this to my parents, who asked, "Did she pay tithing?"  Oh.  Yeah.  Tithing.  I remember that.  And we pay it when we earn money.  But for some reason it never occurred to us that Julia should pay tithing, too.  The trick, however, is to explain tithing to a 3 year old who barely even understands what money is at all.  Or fractions.  Let alone making a connection between God granting us abilities to earn money and pay checks and funds for running the church and other related issues.  To further drive home the point that this is above age level for her, there is no tithing lesson in the nursery manual, nor the Sunbeams manual.  So we made it up ourselves.  Hopefully it worked.  At the root of it all, we decided, "When you earn some money, we give a little bit of it to the Bishop, because it's a commandment."  And really, what else is there?