A Princess in Training

Today, Alexis and I were looking through her book order form for school and I offered to buy her one book and told her she could buy any others she wanted with her own money. She "hum-hawed" about that for awhile (she really doesn't like spending her money) and eventually picked one out that looked fun but didn't cost too much. We got the money out of her bank and filled out the order form and I noticed Lexi playing around with her bank again. Amazingly, although we had taken out the only five dollar bill she had, there was another five dollar bill in her bank just a few minutes later. I asked her about it and she came up with some story about how she'd been keeping another five dollar bill somewhere else and now that she used the one in her bank, she was replacing it with this secret stash. I didn't get upset (viusally, anyway) right off the bat but keep up the questioning so that I didn't accuse her if she were really telling the truth. The further she got into her rather elaborate "story" the more suspicious I became until I eventally cracked the case and figured out what had happened. I was broken -hearted to discover that Alexis had stolen money from Aubrey's bank and then lied about it! My sweet little girl! You want SO much for them to make good choices and hope you are teaching them good things and then when they do something like this...well, it hurts. I can teach her how to read but how do I teach her to have a good heart? I left her alone for a few minutes to think and when I came back, she was on laying on my bed with tear streaked cheeks and sobbed, "I feel like Katie! She stole the Widow shoemaker's pie and lied about it like I did to Aubrey!" Katie is the main character in the wonderful book, "Daughter of A King" by Rachel Ann Nunes. If you don't have it, you should! We have read this book to Alexis dozens of times and we talk about it and use the principles in the story (which are those of the gospel) often as we talk about our choices and actions and how we want to act like princesses so we can return to the "Crystal Palace" one day. Although we talk about it regularly, we haven't read the book in a little while so I was surprised she thought of that incident in the story. I was glad Lexi reminded me of the story to help me decide what to do next with Alexis. (I wanted to be really mad at her and call her daddy at work to think up some great punishment!) I thought for a moment, "what did Katie's parents do in the story?" We had a good talk and took care of the necessary apologizes and moved on and I will keep up my hope that next time she gets a crazy idea to do something like that, instead she will think about it and choose not to do it in the first place!