H-E-Buddy’s Eleven

We are regular customers at our local H-E-B grocery store. It’s usually jam-packed with confused college students trying to shop without mom for the first time, but it’s cheap enough to merit driving a little further from home and putting up with the crowds.

Unfortunately, that desire to save a little money on groceries and The Boy’s unnaturally good luck have lead to yet another lame addiction on my part. (Even Zoo Tycoon and Webkinz mini-golf are taking a back seat to this one.)

You see, they hand out little paper vouchers called “Buddy Bucks” to kids who enter the store. Buddy Bucks are named after their goofy sack-o-goods mascot, H.E. Buddy. The mascot is actually kind of scary, but given how the company has managed to overcome the stigma of selling food products with the last name of Butt, I’m willing to cut them a little slack in the padded-foam-alter-egos department.

Anyway, kids can then use their Buddy Bucks to play a little crane game by the checkout lanes that gives them stickers with points on them. Once you’ve collected enough points, you can trade them in for merchandise of questionable valuable to anyone except small children – which I suppose is okay, since really they’re aiming for the kids with the whole thing. (Some other bloggers’ experiences with the whole Buddy Buck phenomenon can be found here and here.)

This would be all well and good if it weren’t for one thing – The Boy is exceedingly lucky when it comes to plucking those plastic balls out of the machine. They come with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 and 50-point stickers in them and The Boy seems to have a knack for grabbing the 50-pointers. (I’m thinking about taking him to track or having him pick some lottery numbers for me.)

So far he’s collected 465 points and he’s set his sights on the Holy Grail of H-E-B prizes: the pirate H.E. Buddy blanket! We’re only 35 points away!

The problem

There’s only one slight problem – to get the blanket, The Boy has to amass those 500 points and get them in the mail no later than January 7th.

Like I said, we’re only 35 points away, but with The Baby on the way and The Boy himself headed down south to visit the grandparents for a while, our window to collect those final points is now alarmingly small.

Sure, we could get lucky and snag another 50-pointer, but more likely we’ll get a trickle of lame 1 and 2-pointers. It could conceivably take 35 more Buddy Bucks to reach our goal.

How can we possibly cram that many trips to the grocery store into such a small time frame? How long will it take the staff to catch on to the fact that the same guy and his kid are coming in several times a day to buy a pack of gum and then hit the crane game machine? Why has this suddenly become so important to me?

The plan

The Boy had some Buddy Bucks from previous trips saved up, so we used all of those today to get us up to 465 points. (The machine had been broken for an extended period of time a couple of months ago, but they kept handing out the vouchers.) I think if we hit the store a couple of times tomorrow and the day after, we should be able to get the final 35 points before The Wife goes into labor.

It will take dedication, determination and some deft crane handling, but I think The Boy is up to the challenge. We must succeed. Failure is not an option.

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• This morning, while The Wife scrapbooked and I worked on the computer, The Boy silently pulled a chair into the corner of my office and proceeded to play on his Gameboy in silence. He’s such a weirdo sometimes. 
• I took The Boy to see Alvin and the Chipmunks this afternoon. It was surprisingly… well, not good, but certainly not bad. He thought it was great and giggled non-stop throughout the entire movie.
• Ridiculously strong winds last night kept knocking out half of my epic Christmas light display. I just gave up around 9 p.m. and waited until this morning to reconnect them.
• Since The Boy and I have time to go to the store several times a day, The Wife has obviously not gone into labor yet. Could happen at any moment though…