I'm loosing my marbles

My girls take piano lessons. As an incentive, their piano instructor has us track how long they practice, for every ten minutes they practice they get a check mark, for every three check marks they get to choose a prize from the teachers prize box. My youngest daughter is five and every week she comes home with a couple of baseball cards from the prize box. I showed her how to identify the valuable cards: rookies, Red Sox and all stars in that order.

As an incentive for both girls, but particularly as an incentive to motivate the five year olds daily reading habits, we started our own prize box. I ventured into the attic to fill a shoebox with some trinkets from my childhood. In went an abundant supply of baseball cards, marbles, a geode, a fossil and some coins given to me by my grandfather from his travels in Europe during WWII.

Now I was hoping that youngest would develop a passion for reading shared with baseball card collecting or possibly open the door to becoming a Numismatist. So what would you guess she would spy on her first pick from the prize box? A Red Sox baseball card or an old european coin? No she wants my marbles.

When I was a child I would scour any collection of marbles for the rare one or two which had nothing cast into the glass. These rare marbles served perfectly well as marbles, but also, were perfect for viewing objects through them as a lens.

So the little one is reading like a fiend, an hour a day, to get my marbles. No flys on the big one, she has the geode and has her eye on the fossil, I see a potential geologist in her.