No Such Thing as a Free Lemonade Stand

"It's lemonade stand season, Mommy!" cries Julia at the first snap of decent weather. I know the drill — dig out the poster board, the card table, the tablecloth, and stock up on lemonade and cups. Thankfully we live in a walking neighborhood where people happily shell out 50 cents to a pair of sweetly smiling children for a cup of lemonade.

As our kids have grown and become (how should I put it?) more "fiscally aware," the lemonade stands have begun to leave a sour taste in my mouth. At the end of the day my mini-tycoons spend hours greedily counting profits, blissfully ignorant of their start-up costs. Somewhere along the line we've neglected some key financial concepts like "expenses" and "losses."

"It's time the children learned about profit and loss," booms Dave, sounding like Mr. Banks in "Mary Poppins."

"They just learned subtraction!" I respond, but know he's right. Fearing Dave might give the kids his "doom-and-gloom financial speech" which paints our family as one lemonade stand (or new pair of jeans, depending on what sets him off) away from hobo town, I decide to broach the subject with them.

"From now on you two need to use the money you made from the last lemonade stand to buy supplies for the next." They exchange confused glances.

"Is that because we used the lemonade that was for the teacher 'preciation breakfast?" Henry asks anxiously.

After reassurance and a hard-sell about how cool it is to have your own business, we went out and purchased supplies — lemonade mix and the cheapest paper cups we could find. Then we plugged our costs into a nifty lemonade stand program we found online at coolmath4kids.com. And just like that, the great lemonade subsidization was a distant memory.

I'll leave it up to Dave to convince them the profits should go to their college funds.