How to ruin the moment

So I decided to take my 2 year-old to the mall the other day to play in the play area and enjoy an Annie Anne's Soft pretzel (mmm, yummy!). One of the things that she enjoys doing is going to where the coin-operated rides are and pretending that they actually are real vehicles, or horses, or whatever. Now I'm sure that everybody remembers these types of "rides". They usually are parked outside of your favorite department store. Your mom or dad would sit you on it and drop in a quarter (nowadays it's between 50 cents and a dollar..yikes!) and the machine would move up and down or back and forth and play music or make noise for like 3 minutes and then stop. For the most part, a terrible waste of money. Meg and I have resolved not to waste our money on things like this in order to teach our children the value of money, as well as to save it for yummy soft pretzels.

Anyways, so we're at the mall and Audrey is playing merrily on the rides, role-playing between and astronaut or a bus driver (depending on which ride she is on), when some woman with her 0.5 year old comes over and drops in 50 cents into the machine so that her toddler can sit there in a trance, drool, and then eventually cry and try to get out of the thing. What ruins the moment for me is that, all of the sudden that parent has just created a situation for my daughter and I. She inadvertently "unlocked" the knowledge that money could be grossly wasted on these "rides", and that eternal happiness could be achieved at the price of 50 cents. I now need to convince my 2 year old that she doesn't need to slowly go back and forth for 3 minutes to the sounds of Old MacDonald playing over and over again for 50 cents. It took about 5 minutes to explain this to her, but thankfully she dropped the topic and went on to her new position as a train conductor.