We’re all guilty of it — buying kids too much. You mean to go to the store for toilet paper and come back with an $8 pack of Charmins and $28 in plastic. 

How to break these kids, both in habit and spirit, I wondered? I decided this would be the summer of saving, earning and playing with free things.

Saving was first up. There were many scenes over non-purchased toys. But I stood my ground, even in the face of the “but it’s only a dollar” dollar bin.

This took maybe 5 trips to the store. I broke them that quickly. I mourned the hundreds of dollars gone before, needlessly, in weak moments from here to Target.

Next up was teaching Kendall to earn his money for the toys he thought he had to have, all of which I made sure he would be unable earn in a summer’s time.

I taped a $20 bill to the fridge and a piece of paper for Kendall to start earning it a quarter at a time. He got money for things like getting me a (usually) non-alcoholic drink, putting away laundry (ingeniously skewing the system and charging me by the piece — still, totally worth it), and letting the dog out (“even though I was closer.”)

This worked well, and I soon found I could take away quarters for infractions just as easily, like saying “What?” before I’d finished my sentence, not sitting still for a haircut with dull trimmers and, above all, for looking at me wrong.

Now that I think about it, I really enjoyed this summer.

And while Kendall toiled over his $20, he found things to do with Nelson in their newfound toy-poverty.

In July, there was the “Hot Rod” Rock Band. We all took on different stage names. Kendall was “Dash,” Nelson was “Sleepy” and I was “Kandy Girl.”

Grandma had affectionately given them a drumset for Christmas, which had been somehow “lost” but reappeared like the Second Coming on the back deck on a clear summer day.

There was also the electric guitar handed down from Great Grandpa Nelson that made the scene, complete with amplifier. We made signs, we took videos, we posted to Facebook. It was such a modern day thing to do for free that I wept a little.

There was also the day the children, banned from TV themselves, decided their stuffed animals needed a living room, couch and TV. Which they made entirely out of leftover Christmas boxes.

Watching them inscribe a cardboard box with 100 squares as buttons for a remote control gave me a feeling like that of a pioneer. What else might I unearth this summer besides playing with boxes?

Next up was… re-inventing the firepit in the backyard. We painted rocks with some semi-dried-up paint I dug up from the back of the cupboard. How I convinced them to do this, I’ll never know. I DO know that I created a rock of such unexpected gloriousness that I gave it a spot of esteem on the deck/rock stage.

In August, we moved on to forts in the woods. Last time I made the mistake of letting them make a fort way out back. Mistake, as in, they were scared to go to it. And so was I at dusk.

This time the fort was within eyesight of the rock stage and came complete with sticks for walls and ferns masquerading as interior design. I felt like Mother Nature herself.

And so, inside a few months, I found (for free!) that my children were creative (boxes, who knew?), resilient (how many times can you earn and lose the same quarter?) and gutsy (a rock band that doesn’t know a single song? Come on, dude, that’s fly).