Thea's Piggy Bank

Thea received her first (rather large) ceramic piggy bank as a gift from my co-worker, Jenny, on October 9, 2004. It was the day of her baby shower, and she was one of the lucky few who actually attended her own shower live and in person versus live and in utero.

I started putting my pocket change into the bank, a little here and a little there, for four years. Until the piggy was full, very, very full. So today, armed with birthday checks from Oma and Aunt Mary and a rather large sack o' coins, Thea and I trotted off to Commerce Bank which has a coin counting machine that doesn't charge a fee, and is open on Sundays.

And promptly returned home because Commerce Bank requires persons opening an account to produce a Social Security card.

And at home, a frantic search ensued. I have my Social Security card, old and new (I applied for a new one during one of my many forays to the Trenton SSA office to get cards for Thea and Micah), Micah's card, but nothing for Thea. Finally a second pass through her ream of documents I found a copy of her SSN card, and that was acceptable.

So we trotted back to the bank, lugging the 24.5 pound sack o'coins, went through the process of opening passbook savings accounts for both Thea and Micah. Once all the paperwork was in place, we lugged the sack o'coins one last time to the coin counting machine and spent ten minutes or so shoving coins down into the sorter. CoinStar is much more user friendly, though the fee seems a little exorbitant.

Guess how much was in the pig?

Wait for it. . . .

Wait for it. . . .



Thea's guess was $99 (the machine allows kids to enter a guess and gives a prize if the guess is within $1.99 of the actual figure).

Steve's guess was $40.

Insert drum roll, please. . . . .



The actual amount was $289.04 in coins, $5 in $1 bills, two Chinese coins, one Canadian penny and one Mexican coin.

As Charlotte wrote in her web, SOME PIG, huh?

The surprising thing was that Thea's understanding of the bank account did not really include leaving the money at the bank. And she now also considers herself independently wealthy, which in today's economy is somewhat true.