You want a hippopotamus for Christmas? Tough.

Every year I get super-excited about the idea of Christmas shopping for my kids. In my mind, I can't wait to get out there and find the perfect toys that will make their eyes light up on Christmas morning. And then every year, as soon as I start looking, reality comes and crushes my retail dreams.

First of all, there are no "perfect toys." There are "kind of decent, I think they'll like this" toys, and there are "this looks fun- maybe they'll play with it for more than 5 minutes" toys. But there are no perfect "make Christmas morning live forever in their memories" toys. Basically, everything looks like one more variation on all the plastic junk that we already have cluttering up the playroom. And since they don't even play with that stuff, I have a really hard time dumping a bunch of cash on more of the same.

Which brings me to the second reality check- money. When did toys get so ridiculously, out-of-this-world expensive??? You can't by some junky playset whose cheap pieces will never work properly, and which will probably fall apart the minute your kid tries to play with it for less than $20. And God help you if you want to buy them something that might actually hold together and work the way it does on the commercial. Then you'd better be prepared to shell out no less than $50 for one little toy!! And if your budget is anything like mine, it's pretty much busted after one good toy and one piece of crap toy.

And two toys (one of them crappy) doesn't make for a very impressive Christmas haul does it? We all know that part of the joy of Christmas morning is the sheer volume of loot. It doesn't all have to be great, but boy, there'd better be a lot of it. And while we don't go completely crazy with it, we do like for each child to have a fairly substantial pile. So I wind up spending more than I want to, and buying junk toys that might get played with twice just to see big smiles and sparkling eyes on Christmas morning.

It happens every year. And every year I walk away from Christmas shopping discouraged and frustrated instead of filled with excitement and Christmas cheer. I'm hoping this year will be better. We've already gotten started, and I found some things for Mason that are going to rock his world. And since I literally had no idea what to do for the twins, I took them to Target yesterday and let them wander the toy aisles to choose things they want Santa to bring them. (Side note: that was actually pretty cute. At first they were all, "I want dis, I want dis!" And I kept telling them, "No, we're not buying anything today, but we can put it on your list for Santa." By the end of the trip, they had it down. "Mommy, put dat on my list- big gun. I want dat. Put dat on my list.") So I know what I want to get them and I know how much it costs. Maybe a little more preparation will make this year's shopping experience more gratifying than horrifying. We'll see.....