Making a list

Often on Saturday mornings I leave the house with a shopping list. It's remarkable how often you're able to find exactly what you're looking for. Last Saturday, for example, Emily and I set out to buy a couch and a floor lamp: and, voila!


Today was a little different story. I set out this morning with my good friend, Carol, hoping to find a perfect chair. Al, (Carol's "significant other"), is learning to play a new keyboard and needs a chair to go with it. Alas, no such chair appeared on our horizon this morning. But of course, we did not come home empty-handed. Carol found a few treasures. As for me, for under $25 I dragged home:

• a little, funky magazine rack & table (it will work somewhere)
• a very nice squarish basket (always useful)
• two blue glass bowls to replace ones that keep disappearing from my kitchen
• a blue glass 8" square baking pan (much needed...the one I've been using is nasty)
• a Crate & Barrel green ceramic tray
• books for my classroom: classics! Captain Underpants & the Bunnicula series. Brand new, too. No child ever even looked at these books, something which will definitely be remedied by my third-graders
• 17 Beanie Babies
• a book by Thomas Friedman that it turned out I already owned (rats)
• a lemon zester, which I did not own, but Carol insisted I absolutely need

I know what you're thinking. "Wait a minute...did that say, '17 Beanie Babies'?" Well, yes. I use them for prizes in my classroom. I started it last year after finding a bonanza of beanies for cheap (they're always cheap!) at a garage sale. When my students learn all their times tables and can successfully complete a series of 2 and 6-minute tests in multiplication and division, they get to choose from my "Big Bag o' Beanies". It is quite a ceremony. Everyone stops what they're doing to watch as the child chooses. They name them and then leave them sitting on their desk like little colorful trophies. It has turned out to be a pretty powerful incentive. So I'm replenishing my supply for my upcoming class. Remember the Beanie Baby craze? People were going to re-sell them to pay for their childrens' college educations? Well, it turns out they're really only worth about 50 cents a pop. But to kids who just learned how to multiply and divide, they're priceless.