blog

One of the best things about trading up is trading up for others. My wife is a pro football fan and so this year I bought her season tickets to the Cincinnati Bengals. (They open their season on Monday Night Football.) I’ll accompany her to a game or two, I’m sure, but this really isn’t a case of the husband buying a sports-related gift for himself and trying to pass it off, no pun intneded, as a gift for his wife. I don’t follow the sport and or care much about it. In fact, the thought of sitting in Paul Brown Stadium while it’s 20-degrees (or colder) for four hours sounds like torture. I’d much rather watch it on TV. But the tickets sure made my wife happy, which, in turn, makes me happy. So maybe, in a way, I did buy those tickets for myself.

My two daughters (ages 10 and 12) are horse crazy. They’ve been taking lessons for more than a year, read all the horse fan magazines, draw countless pictures of horses, and otherwise eat, sleep and breath horses (that’s when they’re not absorbed in a Disney channel sitcom such as “Hannah Montana”). So I’ve been investigating buying and boarding a horse for them. A horse is a big step up from the gerbils and chincillas that they’ve had. But I think they’re ready for it. And I know it will please them to no end. I also know that they will be handing over allowance and birthday money and forgoing some Christmas gifts to help keep their new pet well fed, shoed and cared for. It’s a mighty fine life-lesson: trading up costs money, and it also means that you have to make sacrafices and cut corners elsewhere. And, in my book, that’s a lesson worth paying for.