The Hungry Cash Register

For the past three years my best friend and I have coordinated a luminary evening in our neighborhood.   It was initially her idea because she wanted to do something in which her children could give back to the community.   I’m not sure it’s really worked out that way as much of the work of purchasing supplies, transporting heavy loads of sand and coordinating signup genius lists has to be done by us, the parents.  

But all six of our children were there as we distributed the materials to our neighbors and they did work hard to help families get their luminary bags, luminary candles and sand to weight down the bags.   They also helped to collect the money and did a fairly decent job of asking politely if the families would like to donate anything extra to our charity for the year.

There was a lot of interest in counting the money collected.    My best friend’s children had brought over their toy cash register to store funds in.   My parents have this same cash register at their home in the mountains and my daughter loves to play with it when she visits.

As we collected more money the older children would take it out, count the bills, add in the value of the checks and then store things back in an orderly or perhaps less-than-orderly fashion in the cash register. 

This went on for a while.  The pile got larger as we got close to the end of our time at the clubhouse where people could pick up supplies.   After hearing one excited tally total I went over to look in the register drawer.  For some reason the now “counted” bills were all in a single draw slot.   I could barely get the drawer open.    

When I got the drawer open and pulled out the money I felt backwards and discovered some wedged bills.    Then I noticed the drawer wouldn’t close properly.    To jump to the end here, there was $120 in money that had gotten wedged behind and then pushed underneath the drawer.   It would turn out some of the money was play money in addition to the $120 cash.   And there wasn’t an easy solution to get the money out. 

The drawer wasn’t removable and due to the electronics surrounding opening the drawer and putting money in, unscrewing it and taking the bottom off wasn’t straightforward either.   So we got a coat hanger and used the arm of a pair of sunglasses and took turns trying to get the money out.  

Every time we thought we’d gotten the last bill out, more appeared.   Some of us were for giving up and hoping the bills that remained stuck would be play money, but my husband was having none of it.   And he did, with the help of some banging, a second person holding the cash register and a third person using an iPhone light, get the last of the cash out.   

Next year we’re using a cash box.

The Big Boy Update:  We got a tree today for Christmas.   My daughter wanted to know what the machine was like that put the netting around the tree.   My husband said it wasn’t a machine so much as a tool.   My son piped up and said, “a machine has to have a piston.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I was downstairs getting ready yesterday morning.   I’d told my daughter she had to go upstairs to get dressed so we could go.   She went upstairs and then I heard the Amazon Alexa come on in our bedroom.   I said, “yes, can I help you?”   My daughter replied, “I’m calling you because I don’t want to be lonely up here.”