I never would have thought that I would prefer to have the stuffed animal.

The carnival.

Carnies. Fried food. Games where 3 ping pong balls will cost you your child's college savings. Or, the better deal, you can get 8 ping pong balls for the price of two children's college savings. Funny money. Stuffed animals. Because one house can never have enough stuffed animals in it.

Good times had by all, no doubt. Who doesn't love a carnival? We took the family last year and the boys had such a great time. They actually remembered the different attractions and games. Nathan won an orange stuffed dog last year which quickly became Lucy's stuffed dog. So his quest this year was to win another orange stuffed dog.

I swear these carnies are smarter than we give them credit for. In retrospect, I realized that they were using a tactic known in my field as Behavior Momentum, loosely defined as an intervention designed to create a momentum of compliance. Basically creating an environment in which one continues with the behavior of spending your children's college funds until you have made it all the way down the line of games without even thinking twice about it, no matter how painful the games or stuffed prizes may be. So here we are, starting at the beginning of the line of games, collecting another closetful of stuffed animals, and working our way down to the end. I catch up to the family at the last station to see the kids throwing balls into fish tanks, some tanks had different colored water inside and that color would determine your prize. Nathan got a ball in!!! Yay Nathan! We were all so excited... and then it happened. The carnie grabs a cup, bends down to a cooler, and begins to get the prize: a freakin' goldfish. My Dad and I look at each other with the same look of "uh-oh". We all look up at the name of the game (which, due to that damned efficient behavioral technique we hadn't done up to this point), and sure enough - it says "Win A Live Fish". Crabapples! Everyone in our party is claiming to not have seen this and I believe them.

Someone thinks of an "out", the weather. It was 105 that day and we still had plenty of carnival-ing to do. So we said - "oh, but it's so hot. It might not survive." Well I'll be damned if those damned carnies are not one step ahead of us, yet again. She hands us a "coupon" to come back at the end of our day and claim it. Nathan is delighted. We are defeated. So we go about our day doing the attractions, eating the food (I finally tried a deep fried Twinkie), and enjoying the mayhem. At the end we're getting ready to depart, thinking we may have a chance at leaving without our live addition to the family, but of course sweet Nathan hasn't forgotten. So we pick up the fish, who received his name immediately, and we bring him home.

He made it the first night. Yay! Maybe we can do this after all! We got food, put him in a nice tank, and flanked the outside of his tank with stuffed goldfish (which probably scared the bejoobies out of the poor guy now that I think about it). Nathan was beaming with pride that he won this little guy and couldn't wait to go to school on Monday and tell his classmates.

Monday, 6:45am: Me - in bed. Nathan - at my bedside "Mom, how do fish sleep? Cuz he's at the top of the bowl on his side and I can't wake him up."

Me - wishing we had been able to just have another stuffed animal instead.