Sigh...I am feeling horribly guilty just now, because I spent too much money on the damned "claw machine" at work. This is the machine filled with stuffed animals, where you maneuver the claw and it lowers and either grabs the animal or doesn't. For a long time, I've had absolutely awful luck with the thing and suffered weeks of disappointment, until I finally gave up entirely. Well, that all changed tonight. I saw a chanukah teddy bear that looked easy to grab. I tried it with $2 and actually won it, my very first win! Woot!!!! Well, I came home with it, and my kids got excited and wanted to try, too. Back we went to the store. I won 4-5 more animals and got pretty danged good at it. These are the bigger animals, too, not the little beanie baby sized ones. Then I got the coveted Chocolate Minnie Mouse, a collector limited edition not available for retail sale. You can only get them by winning them. I wasted a lot of tries on the Mickey Mouse, which I would have gotten, except that it was attached to another animal which has a velcro hand. I didn't mean to spend as much as I did. It's just that after so much failure, it's SO danged satisfying to actually win, and to win repeatedly like that. We got a total of 8 toys.

When we got home, we lined all the animals up for Charlie (the baby) to pick one. He's almost a year old, and I swear, as bright as my others have been, he seems even smarter. He sat back and looked at them all in turn, and then reached out and picked one, a Russ denim patchwork bear (he seems to like patterns) and it was obvious that he understood that the one he picked was his, and the one he liked best. He's been playing with it all night, happily. I'm really glad we let him pick, because I was going to give him a different one, and give the one he picked to one of the other kids. Seeing him so happy helps temper some of the embarrassment of my newfound addiction.

Honestly, if I can just get the Mickey (to match Minnie) and the tree-stump house with a little squirrel in it, I'll swear off the thing entirely. :blush: