April 11

Brady is such a fun little kid. He really is. We were watching Planes this morning when he suddenly jumped up, grabbed a little purple drawstring bag that held a handful of coins, dumped them out on the carpet, and announced that he wanted to play a game with me.

We spent the next 30 minutes playing a variety of games with the coins. And not one of them involved "value" in the traditional sense -- there were no references to a) money or b) counting. We played a variation of pick up sticks, "wrote" numbers by lining up the coins, and stacked them like towers.

And the whole experience reminded me of a kind of random but important lesson: money itself is not evil. It's the way that we treat it and relate to it that can make it a good or a bad thing.

And for Brady, those pennies and dimes spell nothing but invaluable fun.