A few weeks ago, we gave Alex the opportunity to earn an expensive new Buzz Lightyear toy. Well, on Monday morning last week, he finished his chart by vacuuming four rooms upstairs, and that evening we went to the store to purchase Buzz. He had twenty-three dollars in cash in his billfold ($13 of which he earned—the other ten were bonus bucks from his grandparents).
We parked and ran through the cold evening air into the brightness of Target. “What if somebody already bought it?” Alex worried.
But there sat Buzz on the shelf: the kind of expensive, loud, annoying battery-operated toy I find so heartily objectionable. Alex did a little dance as I picked him up off the shelf. “Okay, Alex, where’s your billford?” I asked.
He froze, then looked up at me sheepishly. “It’s in the van.”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” I put Buzz back on the shelf. “Well, we’re going to have to go get him,” I said. The whole point of the exercise was for Alex to hand the cash to the clerk—to have the tactile experience of trading money he earned for something he wanted.
As we ran through Target, back into the frigid darkness, back to the van, Alex wailed, “But what if somebody else takes Buzz before we get back?”
“I really don’t think anybody’s going to take him while we run back to the van,” I said, although I had backup plans in place just in case.
“But I saw another little boy in the store!”
“Well then, you’d better hurry!” I said.
He scrambled into the back seat, pulled out his wallet, and we started over.
And when we got back to the toy aisle…are you ready for this?
BUZZ WAS GONE.
Thank God for backup plans. A: go find an employee and have them check for more in the stockroom. (No.) B: go to Toys R Us, with the understanding that if the toy was significantly more expensive than at Target, we would C: go home and order it online (which was what Christian wanted to do in the first place, as it was several dollars cheaper that way).
We ended up with plan C:
And on Saturday, Buzz arrived.
Success of the program? Well, I’m not so sure. Now he’s telling me all the things he wants his friends to bring for his birthday and all the things he wants Santa to bring next Christmas. So did this really work for me? I think the jury is still out on that one. But I can tell you this: as of now, there’s a serious crackdown on new stuff for Alex. As parents, we want to make our children happy; we love to see them excited. And then we get out of control, giving them things that make them excited for a few minutes (or days or weeks), but in the long run, it is like an addiction: the more they have, the more they want. It’s time for Alex to have some unfulfilled desires.
). But this week, 
