How Much is the Bubble Mower?

I went to the doctor for my son’s three year old check up. The doctor was horrified to discover that he still sucked on a pacifier at three years old. She showed me how his teeth were not growing correctly due to sucking on the pacifier during nap time and at night. I felt like the world’s worst mom for not taking it away sooner, but to be honest, he slept so well with it, that I hated to change a good thing.

Getting rid of the pacifier proved to be a larger challenge that I thought it would be. He was attached to his “binky”. In fact, he had several spares in his bed just in case something would happen to one. He never slept without one. His pacifier was something he loved above everything. At night I would take it out of his bed after he was asleep only to find him in the morning with another one that he had found from his stash.

Later that week I found myself shopping with him. We liked to stroll down the toy isle at the end of our shopping trip to check out the toys. That is where he saw a bubble lawnmower. He wanted it so badly. I told him that it was very expensive and he couldn’t have it. Being the typical three year old, he asked, “How much is it?”.

I thought about it for a moment and there, in the middle of Shopko, I told a white lie.

“It costs a pacifier.” His eyes widened.
“Wow,” he said.
“Do you want to think about it?” I said.
“Yep”.

So we went home empty handed. We whittled the binky’s down day by day to just one now, his favorite one. Soon I found myself back in the store with him. We did our shopping and visited the toys again. He was drawn immediately to the bubble mower and said he wanted to buy it.

We brought the bubble mower to the cashier. As she started to ring it up, I said with a wink, “The price of these mowers is still one pacifier, right?”. She nodded and said yes.

She rang it up and said that will be one pacifier please. My son dug into his little pocket and pulled out the binky, his favorite binky, and gingerly handed it to her. I just stared unbelieving. There he was bravely handing her the most precious thing he owned to buy this bubble mower. It moved me to tears.

And that was it. He never asked about the pacifier or talked about that afternoon again. However, he was seen proudly “mowing” with a trail of bubbles following him around the yard.