Dear Walmart Claw Machine,

You taught me a valuable lesson today. More than one in fact. So thanks for that!

My two kids and I had just finished grocery shopping, a two hour ordeal. We stopped in the "Blue Room" for a beat, so I could re-organize the cart and get everything in a large red bin I just purchased. The kids were bouncing from one machine to the next when I remembered I had a ten dollar bill in my wallet from the other day. I pulled it out, but didn't want to test my luck with the quarter machine. Who needs ten dollars worth of quarters? So we walked over to the Subway to exchange it for two fives, and then back to the Blue Room. But you weren't there, the machine we like best. So we shrugged it off and walked toward the exit.

Then there you were! The machine with new dolls from the "Tolls" movie. Poppy was sitting right there, front and center above the drop. I knew I could easily reach her. So I stuck in my five, and you spit it back out. I tried again, same thing. I tried three, four, five times. You never took it. I should have taken it as a sign, but was too stubborn. So back to the self-check out we went, to buy a fifty cent bag of chips with four dollars and change to spare.

We walked back over, the kids happily munching on their chips. Finally you took my dollar bill. First try I snagged Poppy Doll around the middle. You lifted her up, the kids cheered, and I whooped. We were all dancing. Then you released Poppy Doll over the slot, and she dropped. Then she stopped dropping. There she was, just dangling there, stuck on the lip of the drop box by her insanely large tag!

I was pissed. I quickly use up my second try. Then my third, and fourth, and fifth. I used up an embarrassing number of tries, attempting to get Poppy Doll unstuck. I even "won" another prize and dropped it down right on top of her big pink head, but she still wouldn't budge. I stood there, just staring for a few long minutes. I was mad, and sad, and wanted to go get even more dollar bills. I just keep going back and forth about it a few times. After a while Blake piped up, "Sometimes you can't win, and you shouldn't get upset."

This is a mantra I have told him on several similar occasions and it was funny to hear him repeat it back to me. Because I was, I was standing there stewing and getting upset. My life lately seems like this long line of claw-machines. I win--by all accounts that Poppy Doll should have been mine--but at the last moment my prize gets snagged. Instead of me pulling it happily out of the box it sits there, dangling out of reach. It just wasn't meant to be!

So there it is, "Sometimes you can't win," at the claw-machine, or house building, or just LIFE, "and you shouldn't get upset."