The year is now 2012. This is the moment that I realize I’ve made Logan just a few years younger than myself. He turns 12 as the year does (or close to it, anyway) just like my younger brother Peter did when he hit 12. This makes keeping track of time relatively easy, thank god.<\/p>\n
Lottie’s BookNook has had some shockingly successful months, three to be exact, since they opened. Michael and Kelly had imagined a steady stream of cost or income which they would find once their store had been open a year. They assumed that once open it would be clear if they would enjoy a little boost from it, or an ongoing cost they’d have to budget for. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Some months the shop feels like a consistent bleed of money, and some they get an exciting little payout. Annoyingly, it doesn’t ever line up with when they expect the highs and lows to be.\u00a0 A popular book comes out and they expect more traffic, but the mall has it for cheaper and the wholesale price for a store barely makes it worth carrying. A month is supposed to be bad and then a regular D&D group rent the place every Friday night for two months. They get used to the group and appreciate the people they bring in, and then the party stops meeting because someone went to college and someone else got a new job.
\n<\/p>\n
Logan is getting old enough to really appreciate the free space he basically has on retainer for anytime after hours. He gets to use it for sleepovers and movie nights, making him far more popular than he would have been without the amenity. He has his first ever real fight with his parents when a group of his friends wreck one of their best selling board games. They got a hold of a copy of The Settlers of Catan and defaced the pieces in an effort to make a homebrew war game. Logan, in an effort to appease his friends did nothing to stop it. As a result, he was not allowed to use the space for his thirteenth birthday party. Logan learned a hard lesson that birthday, one his parents didn’t mean to teach him, but did anyway. Logan’s friends were far less interested in him without his shiny play space, and he spent his birthday ‘party’ learning that; alone.<\/p>\n
This is a hard time for the whole family, but Logan leaves it -for better or worse- more grounded and mature. It sucks that it happened, but Logan chooses his friends a bit more carefully going forward.<\/p>\n
He suggests to his dad not long after that they should offer the space for birthday parties. If the kids at school liked it so much to pretend to be friends with someone for it, maybe they’d get their parents to rent it instead. Logan sounds bitter when he suggests this, and his dad is torn. It’s a great idea, which he is proud of his son for thinking of, but it’s no fun seeing your kid hurting. He plans a camping trip for just the two of them. Father and son get to find out together they both hate camping, but both have their spirits lifted by the shared experience. When they return, Kelly surprises Logan with fliers and a sign out front running his idea, which does a fair bit to help as well. Kelly and Michael sit their son down to tell him they’re proud of him, and they’re going to give him more responsibility with their shop. He’s going to get to help choose new games, and plan events, as well as see the budgeting process.\u00a0 They aren’t overwhelming him with actual, real grown-up pressures and expectations, but they are giving him age appropriate jobs to let him feel involved. His first suggestion is that they get a Nintendo Wii and a TV for over the fireplace to hook it up to. His parents are skeptical, but don’t want to shoot down his first suggestion immediately.<\/p>\n
As a compromise they suggest they put the family TV and Wii in the shop for a trial run, before they commit to the big purchase. They half expect Logan to back-pedal because it would mean the TV wouldn’t be available for the majority of most days, but he jumps at the idea.<\/p>\n
As a result, their shop gets a sudden uptick in traffic. Feeling involved; Logan has begun advertising his project at school, and 8th graders love Lottie’s BookNook. Their parents are far more willing to drop their kids off with a family they know, and at a bookshop<\/em> rather than the mall or GameStop. And, like GameStop, Lottie’s BookNook has video games; but these ones don’t just stop after a demo. After a week the family has to implement an hour limit to each kid for the console, and after two weeks they have to put a $5\/hour price tag on usage. Neither seem to deter the 8th graders. Terrifying, but profitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The year is now 2012. This is the moment that I realize I’ve made Logan just a few years younger than myself. He turns 12 as the year does (or close to it, anyway) just like my younger brother Peter did when he hit 12. This makes keeping track of time relatively easy, thank god. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[639],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thesimsoverthinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55804"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55808,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55804\/revisions\/55808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}