My kingdom (or $4.99) for a sword

MY children, at 7 and 5, have discovered money. Not the value of it but the fact of it: how good it feels in your hand, in your pocket, that more is better -- though "more" is still defined in quantity rather than denomination. And they've learned that if you give a clerk enough of it, she will let you walk out of the store with a new Bionicle or My Little Pony.

This breakthrough, in time, will allow our family to organize its own little internal economy -- a society in which beds are made and trash taken out by someone other than my husband and me. For now, however, it has added a whole new dimension to traveling.

We are not a financially organized family that has a vacation account or even a vacation budget. Travel is important to us so we treat it as we treat any other essential expenditure -- we try to get the best deals we can, we don't eat out a lot, and then we just hope for the best.

My husband, Richard, and I are not foodies, we don't drink, don't collect anything except books, and neither of us has too much interest in high fashion. We travel for the people and the places rather than the things. Still, we do abide by the rule that you never regret money spent while traveling, only the money you didn't spend.

With that in mind, we are in the ever-changing process of coping with the "toy factor." We have tried letting the kids take toys on trips, but that's a pain. If they bring the important ones and lose them, it casts a pall on the trip. Our daughter, Fiona, is still in mourning for Emily, the stuffed panda she dropped into one of the animal cages at the Coliseum two years ago.

And you will buy them new toys. Because this is vacation, darn it, and they would rather have a notepad from West Ireland's Aillwee Cave or another set of army men than an ice cream bar. Who are you to refuse them?

On long trips, we have an understanding with our kids that they can buy a couple of nice things to take home and a number of plastic tea sets and toy soldiers that will be left behind.

We budget for these through a highly sophisticated manner of savings -- a milk bottle full of loose change collected throughout the year (average yield: $95) and the contents of a ceramic cow into which Mom and Dad must put a dollar every time they use a bad word in front of the children (average yield: none of your beeswax).