Being a Role Model Sucks

For the last few days, my son's been incessantly pleading (as young kids are wont to do) for me to buy him some Floam (some new gee-whiz a Play-Doh-esque molding toy that sticks to everything). After he drove my wife up the wall this afternoon with the pleading, I offered a compromise with him -- I'd take him to Toys 'R Us to look for some Floam, and make a purchasing decision based on how expensive it was.

As it turns out, We Be Toys didn't have any Floam in stock (and my research leads me to believe it's a direct-order-only toy), so we wandered around the store window-shopping instead. I took the opportunity to practice my parenting skills and talk about the importance of resisting rampant consumerism, that we can't buy everything that catches our eye, that we need to save for a rainy day, blab blab blab.

And as we're making the final rounds, we pass by the action figure aisle, and suddenly the Siren's Song of Superfluous Spending(tm) calls to me -- with a big-ass fully-detailed $50 Supreme-Class Transformers: Cybertron Starscream figure.

After drooling over it for a few moments, I turned to my son and reiterated that -- no matter how much Daddy really really really REALLY wanted to buy Starscream and give him a cherished place on his desk -- that I wasn't going to do that, demonstrating all those hard-hammered lessons on frugality and whatnot. Then we hightailed out of the store before my willpower melted like a crate of butter under a blowtorch.

But still... *Sigh*