How Compulsive Moms Have a Lemonade Stand

This morning, my boys decided to have a lemonade stand. The impetus for the idea was a plan they found in a library book that provided schematics for a lemonade cart. It used, among other things, a bicycle wheel and a great deal of lumber and hardware, for the price of which I could have taken my kids down to the chi-chi Sundance Cinema Cafe and treated them to an entire meal capped off with glasses of frosty fresh-squeezed lemonade while Robert Redford himself fanned us with palm fronds. I had a very hard time letting go of my paradigm of the lemonade stand as a profit-making venture. If we had used generic concentrate we might have broken even, but I would be embarrassed to serve it to my neighbors (some of whom I am related to). I am surely delusional in thinking that I have a rep to protect. But we made a simple syrup on the stovetop and went to buy some lemons to juice. They cost 79 cents per (why don't computer keyboards provide you with the "cents" symbol? so wrong) and we had to buy ten. Round up the price to account for sugar and ice, and conservatively this was an eight dollar pitcher of lemonade. The kids wanted to charge a dollar a glass, which would have actually been reasonable, but one always assumes one is surrounded by culinary philistines who DON"T UNDERSTAND what goes into a fine product such as ours. Deciding to take a loss, the price was set at two bits a glass (notice my end-run around the lack of "cents" symbol by retreating even further into antiquity) and our inventory snapped up by neighbors, our stand hastily dissassembled before we were shut down for health code violations.