Money

For nap today, Sava and I read a new book called How I Learned Geography by Uri Shulevitz. It tells the story of a little Jewish boy from Poland whose family flees to Turkestan in modern-day Kazakhstan during the war, where they endure poverty and hardship. The boy's father comes back with a map of the world instead of bread one night, and the book is a celebration of the map as the little boy's escape from misery and hunger. We recently talked about what being "poor" means in relation to another book, Fire at the Triangle Factory.  Sava knew that being poor means not being able to buy stuff, but he seemed shocked to find out today that being poor means even not being able to buy enough food. As I was explaining to him at one point that the boy's family was so poor they could not afford to buy things to eat, Sava assumed a concerned look, and said: "I think they should go to Google to get more!" "To get more what, sweetheart?", I asked. "To get more money! Google sells a lot of money and they could get some and buy some food." 
Yes, we've been telling him that daddy goes to work at Google so we could have money so we can buy stuff. He is pretty confused about where money comes from, what it means, and how it relates to the things he wants. We are notorious for having something close to complete disregard for material possessions of almost any kind, and I have been thinking hard about how to instill some of that in our children, without causing the opposite reaction. Sometimes not having much at all makes you want to have it all, and it would be sad if we achieved that by limiting what we get for our kids. At the same time, having too much and wanting more is a disease we see all around that we'd like to avoid, if at all possible. Hard stuff.