THE MACHINE!!!

I am completely unashamed to say that I totally use bribery with my kids. Sometimes you do whatever works. My little trick to get Joshua to be a good listener in the grocery store is to dangle the idea of playing with the claw machine in front of him. Works like a charm! We have never actually won anything, but he still gets a big kick out of it. So yesterday, we took a family trip to the grocery store. Joshua was talking about the machine the whome time we were there, and was being a pretty good boy, so while Daddy was checking out, I took him over to the machine. After the two attemps we got with our dollar, we were so close to winning something, I just had to pull out another $.50 and try one more time. That was all we needed... we won! Josh ended up with a blue Christmas cap. To say he was elated would be an understatement. He started jumping up and down and shrieking at the top of his lungs "We got something out of the machine! We got something out of the Machine!" I look over at Andrew who is probably about 100 feet away at the checkstand, and he is cracking up. Apparently the whole store knew that Joshua had won something from the machine, from the sheer volume of his excitement. The whole way home we heard about 50 different recounts of the tale about when a boy named Joshua got something out of the Machine. What a magical day that was! Gotta love what excites a 3 year old!