Friday Evening, as I prepared my traditional St. Patty’s day Corned beef and Cabbage dinner, my 18 month-old daughter sauntered into the room holding two small teddy bears. They were the kind of itty-bitty teddy bears they sell in the dollar section at Target. I don’t think the child has left Target once without a dollar animal clutched in her hands. I have to beg the cashier to scan it as quickly as possible to minimize the shrieking she emits from the time I wrestle the critter from her grasp to get rung up to the time her little stuffed buddy is safely back in her sticky, dimpled little hands. She happily chirps whatever the appropriate animal noise is. “ROOOAR!”, “Woof!”, or “EEE-OW”. My daughter just loves her some little dollar Target creatures.

For all the bitching I do about the consumerism that Americans buy into, in the end I am a spineless hypocrite. I could, feasibly, walk by the dollar section without handing my child a small stuffed toy likely made by children in a third world country, and she wouldn’t even notice. But these little animals make her happy. I mean, she LOVES them. We have nine tiny stuffed dogs lined up on her dresser and the plays with them every day. She walks from room to room, clutching them to her chest. We also have 2 bears, a “Tih-tee”, a couple of bunnies, an elephant, and a giraffe. They were a dollar each. Meanwhile the expensive toys we carefully chose for her gather dust in the corner.

So, the lesson she learns is that buying crap at Target is really quite satisfying. That, plus Target has a mysterious diuretic impact on the bowels of our people. My sisters and I share the same affliction. We call it “The Target Affect”. We now have our own subtle vocabulary to describe desperate diarrhea moments. When one of my sisters tells me she is having a “Target moment” I need not look farther than the sweat beading on her forehead to know she needs to get to a bathroom, pronto. Give any of us ten minutes of wide-eyed browsing in the aisles at all the stuff we could feasibly buy and take home with us, and suddenly we are turning on our heel and sprinting to the bathroom. All the consumer-based excitement and browsing apparently has a stimulating, affect on the bowels. The week after I gave birth to Maggie I was terrified of pooping. The trauma of childbirth does really strange things to your system that way. I limped around the house for a few days and finally thought to myself: “Target!” One trip for baby supplies, and one sprint to the Target restroom, and I was smiling again. Problem solved.

So Target really is not such a bad place, I suppose.

Friday evening as I stood at the stove poking our large slab of boiled meat with a fork, Maggie walked in with her Target Bears clutched in her hands. She looked at me, lifted her ittle bears into the air like "Rocky" and exclaimed “One! Two!”. My mouth fell open. It was the first time I had heard her try to count. It appears there is another redeeming factor for Target that I had not considered. Strollling the aisles of Target is the best non-chemical laxative known to man, and the little dollar animals Target sells are also excellent learning tools. Plus she likes to make them kiss each other, which I think is sweet. And the two bears cost me all of two dollars. One could take that a step further and consider that Maggie also posesses a more sophisticated understanding of additional meanings of the numbers one and two. Cough. You know. “Number one” and “number two”…. The child is certainly a genius. She gets it from her mother.