November 23, 2004

How Not to Plan Your Future

The wife, the kid and I were in Target yesterday shopping for Christmas stockings. Not exactly something you wake up in the morning excited about, but not something you dread either. It’s somewhere in the middle.

What I didn’t wake up realizing is that stocking-shopping day is the day you also must plan your future, specifically, how many members of the family do we expect to have 10 years from now. If you guess too few, then either someone won’t get a stocking or they’ll have to settle for one that doesn’t match or the more likely scenario is that we would have to buy a whole new set of stockings so that they would all match. Because the odds of Target selling the exact same style 5-10 years from now is unlikely. So if you guess too few, then that’s bad. If you guess too many, than we waste money.

So right then and there, in Target, Tiffany and I decided (as if God didn’t really have a say in the matter) how many kids we would have. Yep, a decision of that great magnitude was made solely on the basis of Christmas stockings.

So how many did we buy? Five.

It’s a good thing for that third child, that these stockings were on sale. One day when he’s (or she’s) grown, will be asked about our decision to have a third child, and we’ll smile and say, “Well, Sweetie, your stocking was on sale at Target for $7.99. We couldn’t pass up a deal like that.”

Oh and by the way, Tiffany also wanted us to come up with all three of their names so we could go ahead and have the stocking monogrammed just alike.