cancer – day 498
Today is my niece’s birthday, Hannah turns ten years old today.
I knew before my brother ever started having kids that I would never be able to keep up with birthdays and coming up with cool gifts more than once a year for each kid (Christmas is bad enough), and I’ve always known that when it came to birthdays, I would be the kind of Aunt that sends money in the card.
But how much to send? Every year from as early as I could remember until the year before she died, my Grandma Inez sent me a ten dollar bill in my birthday card. When I was in my twenties, well, it was a nice gesture but I felt guilty for receiving it. I mean, ok, back then (I say it like it was eons ago, sheesh, I’m not THAT old), back when I was in my early twenties and still receiving ten dollars a year for my birthday, in a way I felt guilty for receiving the money that it seemed my grandma couldn’t really spare and in a way I felt amused in a self-important sort of way that embarrasses me now, not appreciating the money because it didn’t buy much. But how was my 96-year-old grandmother living in a elderly care facility supposed to know that? For shame, Cynthia.
Anyway, enough of the memory lane guilt trip. My Grandma Inez was an absolute dear and it’s amazing that she remembered my birthday every year of my entire life and thought so much of me as to send a card and money every year.
So anyway, birthdays and money. I decided many, MANY years before my brother started having kids that I was going to send money for birthdays, and NOT spoil them with gifts at any other time of year except Christmas. So they wouldn’t have expectations of me as the Aunt buying their attention by always having presents for them. Guess there’s quite a bit of my Norwegian grandmother (and my Mom, the “Norwegian Princess” as Dad fondly teases her) in me, not wanting to spoil Eric’s kids.
At the same time, I needed some way to address the inflation issue that bemused me about my grandma, and a way to keep track of how old Eric’s kids were. I can’t for the life of me keep track of my own age (and I was off by more than ten years the last time I tried to guess my dad’s age), let alone remember when each of Eric and Nancy’s three kids were born and how old that makes each of them each year. Now that Hannah and Cameron are in school at least I can stay fairly accurate by knowing what grade they’re in.
Boy, I am REALLY making a short story long here. Oh well, I don’t journal as often as I did during treatment, so it’s not really more to read, just more to read at one time. 😉
So every year when it’s a niece’s or nephew’s birthday, I have alarms in my calendar to remind me their birthday is coming up and I can usually mange to buy a card in time, and I write a check. My dollar amount methodology is simple but I like it . . . add a zero to the kid’s age. Each year the old checks are in my Quicken so I can sort by name, see what I sent last year, and thus send the correct amount the following year.
And now that Hannah is ten, she gets $100. This may seem overly generous now, but when she’s 21 in the year 2020 (not sure of my math, but close enough) and she’s getting only $210 in 2020, well, then it probably won’t seem like much.
But instead of writing her a check this year, I got a crisp $100 bill to put in her card. Something different, and hopefully fun for her. There’s this website, www.wheresgeorge.com, where you can enter the serial number from a bill of U.S. currency and then when that bill travels the country and other people find it and check it on Where’s George, you can see the history of where that bill was when. So I wrote the website on the bill in several places, and explained in her birthday card what to do online to find it, and that’s her 10-year birthday present. I thought it was pretty neat, I haven’t heard if she received it yet. Probably not, since they were going camping in Yankton over the holiday weekend for her birthday.
How cool is it that my now 10-year-old niece wanted to go camping ten minutes from my parents’ place for her birthday? It’s pretty cool, how much Eric’s kids love their grandparents.