A Momologue by Julie: When my daughter scored a stuffed animal from the crane game, we both won so much more.

"Every time I take my 3-year-old to the grocery store, she begs to play the crane game. You know, the arcade rip-off that grabs your money but not much else. Each and every time she asks, I give her a dollar, and she tries (unsuccessfully) to grab a teddy bear or stuffed animal with the crane-like apparatus. Every time she presses that red button, I say a little prayer that she will somehow, some way, win a stuffed animal this time. Now, mind you, the girl already has at least 50 stuffed animals littering her room, so it's not so much the animal I'm praying for. It's more the feeling she'd get when she's won...the moment of victory...that I want her to experience. And this week, it finally happened. When the crane descended into the mountain of plush animals, it grabbed one: a light blue teddy bear with an over-sized head. As it began to ascend above the rest of the pack, my daughter's eyes grew big as saucers. She jumped up and down and said, "I won! I won!" Before I could even think, I said, "I'm so proud of you!" (Why I was PROUD that she positioned the crane grabber over the stuffed animal in exactly the right position, I'm not really sure, but that's indeed how I felt.) She grabbed the stuffed animal and hugged it tightly to her chest, savoring her moment. And I savored it, too. Sure, she'd probably sunk at least 50 of my hard-earned dollars into this very machine before, making this the most overpriced teddy bear in history. But the fact that my little girl felt like a winner for that shining moment, like the luckiest girl in the world, was priceless."