When my sons were no longer toddlers, I was excited about their abilities to draw cute stick figures of the family and other Crayola masterpieces that I would cherish for life.

My first son is more of an abstract artist, so even though every one of his pictures is colorful and has a lengthy story to go with it, he's not much for realism. My other son, however, is more of a perfectionist, and just recently he developed enough dexterity to draw what he calls "things that look like things."

I've often referred to him as "my little Napoleon Dynamite" and he continues to earn this nickname with his subject choices for his artwork. He draws a lot of fantasy-genre pictures of rainbows, dragons and unicorns -- which he still insists on calling "unihorns." (No ligers yet.)

At one point I told him how much I loved unihorns when I was a little girl and that I still like them today (in a kitschy, nostalgic way, but I didn't get into that). Immediately, he sat down and started drawing a unihorn / rainbow picture for me that was his best to date. He then wrote a "1" and a "2" in the upper right corner of the paper.

"This is for you, Mom, but it's not for free," he said.

I asked him how much it cost and he pointed to the numbers in the corner of the page. "It's either $1 or $2," he said.

"Hmmm," I said. "Well, in that case, I pick $1."

"Good choice, Mom," he said.

Since then, all of his artwork includes a price tag. Sometimes it's "$1 or $2" but other creations, like the smiling wizard standing in a field of broccoli, is a whopping "two hundred thousand million."

"Maybe you can save up at the bank for it," he said.

Who says creatives don't make good business people?