Peyton's quest for Disneyland - part 1

In a couple weeks we will be taking a mini vacation! yay! We are going to be visiting my parents to celebrate my Dad's 70th birthday (we are having a hillbilly party for him...hee hee) and than we are leaving the kids with Nana and Papa and Brandon and I are going to Arizona for a few days. It's actually really exciting, Brandon was chosen to present a paper he wrote at the society of biblical languages conference... more on that later.
Well I usually wait until the very last min to tell Peyton that we are going somewhere fun because as much as we have tried to teach her about days, weeks, months and years the concept is still very foreign to her. One week in our world means any second in hers, so you can imagine why I try to wait. Well my wonderful husband (in true husband like fashion, which is not his fault, he is not with her all day everyday and does not have to listen to the constant questioning, so he does not know that some things MUST be kept secret for the sanity of the MOM... I digress) told Peyton that she was going to see Nana and Papa soon. Well this was about a week ago and sometime during the course of having to explain to her everyday...no we are not going to Nana's today... she got her in mind that not only is she going to Nana's house she is also going to DISNEYLAND! If you know anything about my child you know that it is not easy to talk her out of one of her ideas. She could tell you that the sky is green and you could try all day long to tell her that the sky is not green it is blue and she would continue to tell you that in fact the sky was green, so trying to tell her that she was NOT going to go to Disneyland was not going well. So I decided to try to rationalize (with a three year old this can be tricky) and tell her that we did not have enough money to go to Disneyland. The conversation went something like this:

Mom: Disneyland cost a lot of money. Daddy would have to work a long time to save enough money to go to Disneyland.
Peyton: But all we have to do is get a ticket!
Mom: Yes, but tickets cost a lot of money and we do not have alot of money
Peyton: We can go to the store and get more money
Mom: no that is not how it works. You have to work hard to earn that much money.

So that morning after hearing about her going to Disneyland for several hours I finally got her on the phone with Nana in hopes that Nana would be able to explain things better than I. That conversation went something like this:

Peyton: Nana I want to go to Disneyland with you
Nana: You do?
Peyton: Yes and ride all the rides like the Carousel and the train and the elephant! but mommy said no because we don't have a ticket.
Nana: Well we just might have to see what we can do about that!

So as you can see Nana was of no help.

The next morning after exhausting her father and I at the the Breakfast table with all this Disneyland talk I finally had a brilliant idea. I told her that she could go to Disneyland if she could raise enough money to go. (Secretly knowing that Nana and Papa would not be able to refuse her little pleading face and would eventually buy her a ticket to go to Disneyland anyways, I might as well get a lesson out of this... right?) So we got her piggy bank off the shelf and counted the money she had in it. She actually had, to my surprise, $12 in it. Than we looked online to see how much tickets to Disneyland were and found out they are $62 dollars! (holy cow!) So I told Peyton she had to work to raise $50 more dollars to buy a ticket to go to Disneyland. We talked about things she could do to work for the money like picking up her toys (at that moment she immediately jumped up and did that) helping mom match the socks from the laundry, emptying the dishwasher, washing her dishes and being nice to Amber (which will be the hardest of all the jobs and worth the most money!) It has been a few days now and let me tell you I have a different child on my hands!!! She has been so helpful and asks me all day what she can do to get money and jumps at the task and does it well!!! I pretty much have her trained to fold socks and empty the silverware from the dishwasher and today while Amber was being fussy in the car instead of shouting at her to be quiet Peyton reached over and grabbed Amber's hand and said "Its ok Amber, we will be home soon" I just about died. I caught her eye in the rear view mirror and she said "did I earn some money mommy?"
So we will see how long this last. I will keep Peyton's quest for Disneyland updated...I am not sure if this is going to be a great lesson learned for her if it will back fire on me and from now on she won't help around the house unless she gets some money for it. But a parent's role is ultimately a big guessing game right?