The Birthday Contract

I’m about to let you in on one of the big secrets of my success…such as it is.   As far as I’m concerned my dad invented this idea, but sadly I also thought my dad invented the phrase “all the tea in China” for, let’s just say ‘way too long’, so maybe he didn’t, but unless I hear otherwise I’m going to say my dad invented this idea that I consider one of the secrets of my success.

Did I build the suspense?  Hopefully.  Anyway, every birthday of my life (and a whole lot of sci-fi movie opening nights, but that’s another story) my dad and I had a father-daughter day which usually entailed going to see a movie and then dinner to debrief the movie and spend time talking together.  However, one other really important thing happened at those birthday dinners – the Birthday Contract.  I had to tell my dad what I wanted to be when I grew up and three steps that I needed to do that year to get there.  The important thing to me was that he never cared what I was deciding to be as long as I had a goal that I was working towards.  I also got to pick the steps so he wasn’t telling me what to do and the pressure was on me to accomplish it.  For example, one year I said that I wanted to be a circus clown – hey, I was a kid! – and my steps to get there were to continue taking gymnastics, meet a real clown and talk to him about his job, and take an acting class.  As it turns out, to meet a real clown, which my parents set up for me before a Barnum & Bailey circus, you had to pass elephants, and a lot of other animals I’m sure, but the elephants are burned in my mind.  They were huge and terrifying and nothing like on TV or at the zoo when you’re up close and they’re walking around.  Ok, so I should have mentioned that I’m scared of animals.  Right then and there I decided that I did not want to meet a clown, or sit in our front row seats, or be a circus clown when I grew up.  Get me out of here!  Trust me, that was a lot more effective than my parents telling me that I couldn’t be a clown because they didn’t want me too.  Not every year was that dramatic, but taking economics as a freshman in high school definitely moved me away from wanting to be a banker, and going to the Penn Summer Science Academy that summer (since I was already sold on Penn because getting in to Wharton school of business was on my banker to-do list) solidified my desire to be a scientist.

So now that I’m a mom I was reflecting on things, both good and bad, that my parents did growing up and the Birthday Contract was one that I think was a great idea.  I like the idea of my kids setting goals and trying to attain them, and it will be neat to see what’s going through their minds. 

My oldest, Briana, is turning three in a few weeks, and my youngest had a birthday party to go to, so I decided to take Briana out to a big girl lunch at Red Robin.  I pulled out my ‘fancy purple paper’, as my daughter called the stationery, and started the contract while we waited for our food.  “Briana, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked her.  She blurted out “race car driver like Lightning McQueen” but then thought about it for a few minutes and then said “No, Mommy.  I want to be a lawyer like daddy.”  I asked if she was sure, secretly hoping that she’d change her mind and say she wanted to be a chemical engineer like Mommy, but no such change of mind occurred.  So I asked,  “What do you think you need to do this year to be a lawyer?” thinking that I’d have to make up the list this year.  But she surprised me with two really good answers.  “I need to learn my letters and I need to know how to sign a contract.”  Well, she was in luck since the second one she was just about to accomplish.  I asked if she could think of anything else and she said “Daddy reads patents at work so I need to learn to read”.  Of course learning her letters and learning to read aren’t really mutually exclusive (damn you Cornell grad school writing class and your MeCeFe – mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, and functionally equivalent – guidelines for bullet pointed items like this!) but I let that go since she’s only turning 3.  I wrote down all of the items and signed the contract and then told her that here was her chance to learn how to sign a contract.  I explained to her that signing it meant that she was supposed to try to do all of those steps this year so that she could be a lawyer like Daddy when she grew up.  I also told her that she could change her mind if she wanted and that we’d do another one next year (I didn’t want her to feel bound to be a lawyer at only 3, of course).  She focused like I’d never seen her focus before on writing her name.  And she’s a pretty serious kid to begin with!  She tried her best to write a ‘B’ and an ‘M’ (the first letters of her first and last name – the only letters we’ve taught her were in her name yet).  The funny thing was that she understood that those letters weren’t how to spell her whole name, so she wrote a ‘B’ (kind-of) and then scribbled after it and did the same for the ‘M’ which I guess is how it looks when I scribble…ah, sign…my name.  Then we put it away and enjoyed our big girl lunch.  The best part is that this whole week she’s been asking me to point out the words as I read her books and asking how I spell things.  The funniest is that she also just lists a bunch of random letter, like ‘POEOA’ (she loves the letter O and vowels apparently though she doesn’t quite know what they are yet) and asks what that spells.  Then she cracks up when it doesn’t turn out to be a real word.  I credit the Birthday Contract for her renewed interest in letter sounds, spelling, and reading herself!

I think I’m going to laminate each of the kids’ birthday contracts so that they can go back and look at what they wanted to be each year when they’re all grown up.  Maybe I’ll hole punch the sides and put them on a ring so that they can be bound together.  In fact, I think I’ll try to save that stationery for just this purpose, and I’ll get a different kind for Abby (my 17 month old).  I love stationery because I think getting a paper letter in the mail is just so much nicer than an email on special things and I think my kids will see that paper every year and feel the importance of their own contracts – plus then it will fit uniformly on the ring.  I wish that my parents still had mine somewhere.

Let me know if you try the contract and how it goes!

<3 Pedigreed Housewife