When I walked to school with Liam this morning, we talked about money.  Or rather, he talked about money and I wondered where he gets his information.

“It’s better to have a million dollars than just a thousand dollars,” he said. “Because then you don’t have to make any choices. You can do whatever you want. We could go to France and China and Japan…”

We’ve been talking about a family trip to France this summer for my mom’s 70th birthday. Going to France might mean not renting a house at the beach this summer, mostly because of time constraints, but has Liam been listening to our conversations and determined for himself that a bigger checkbook would make it all possible?

“You need a lot of money to be happy, you know. Then we could have a bigger apartment because you and Daddy say that Caleb and I wouldn’t fight so much if we each had our own room…”

Well, seems to me that you and your brother would fight even if you lived in the Taj freakin Mahal…but how can I explain to him that by NYC standards we’ve got a pretty good gig: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a laundry room (okay, a ten year old can’t appreciate the joy of having laundry in the apartment rather than in the basement of the building, but still…) Sure, three bedrooms would be nice–but does saying that in front of him make him think that what we’ve got is insufficient?

I suggest that Daddy and I think it’s more important to do something you love and not necessarily something that makes lots of money.

“No, mommy, you’re wrong. Because you can just do the job you don’t like until you have a lot of money and then you can get a better job that makes you happy.”

I find myself humming Harry Chapin.

“Plus think of all the soccer players who have these really big charities so they can help people and do stuff for their families, and they couldn’t do that if they didn’t make a lot of money.”

Kid’s got a point.

“And besides, you could learn to love whatever job it is. Even if you don’t at first.  It’s just if you start learning something early then you might learn to love it. Like me and BLTs. I mean, I don’t like them now but I could learn to like them.”

YOU? Like a sandwich with tomatoes and lettuce? Never gonna happen.

It’s not that I dislike the movies. I love going to the movies.  I like the theater, too.  It’s just that on my own private ranking system, very few things measure up.

My ranking system isn’t stars or rotten tomatoes or thumbs up-or-down. Nope, my system is much more crass than that: it’s money. If Husband and I “just” want to go to the movies, for instance, even without getting a bite to eat or a glass of wine beforehand, our evening costs us close to $100:  two movie tickets at $12.50 and approximately three hours of babysitting at about $15 an hour, plus maybe a little extra if we get home late and offer to pay for the sitter to take a cab home.  It’s about 70 bucks.  Now tell me, seriously, are any of the movies on that list worth that much money?  (Husband is fairly sure that “Avatar” is worth all the money in the world but I just can’t bring myself to be excited by a movie that my nephew described as “Dances with Smurfs.”)

As for theater? Don’t even get me started. Given that the cheapest seats for most good theater–on or off Broadway–start somewhere in the realm of $50, we’re looking at about a 200 or 300 dollar evening.  I coughed it up in order to see Cate Blanchett in “Streetcar Named Desire,” which was, granted, an amazing experience. Husband tells me that there are lots of amazing theatrical experiences out there – and I know he’s right–but at two hundred bucks a pop, it’s a drag when a performance is only so-so, or even (as is all too often the case) downright dreadful.

Me? I’d rather spend money on going out to eat. Somehow even a mediocre (probably over-priced) meal in a restaurant makes me happy, for the simplest of reasons: I didn’t cook it, I’m not cleaning up after it, and no one is demanding that I leap up to get him more milk some salt another napkin more ketchup dessert now.. I mean please… as soon as I sit down.  

Sarah, in the LA Mom’s Blog, talks about whether a dinner engagement is “sitter-worthy” and I guess for me, most meals out are sitter worthy.  A dinner out with friends–a dinner without discussions of logistics and homework, a meal without mediating between squabbling siblings–that to me is money well spent.

So you go to the movies and I’ll meet you later for dinner so you can tell me all about it.