The salutation in the e-mail reproduced below is the result of our youngest daughter’s pronunciation of apple when she was a toddler—for her it was wap—rhymes with cap—so we called her Wap-Wap.

She has since learned to pronounce the word correctly.

As the proud grandparents of her daughter and son—ages five and eight—we are contributing to their education by posting automatic monthly contributions to their individual savings accounts. She thanked us for our generosity in a recent e-mail.

This is my answer to that e-mail:

Wap-Wap, we thank you for your thank you.

You’re welcome.

When I think of your children and their accounts, I remember you telling your mom what they said when you showed them how much money they have. They speculated that their money would buy a lot of stuffed animals at the Dollar Store.

I pictured them racing around the Dollar Store pushing shopping carts and tossing stuffed animals and other items into the carts, having been loosed, unfettered, with your permission to buy anything and everything they wanted. A home video of that would probably take the grand prize on America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Winning the grand prize of $100,000 would be—would be—well, it would be grand, and even the weekly prize of $10,000 would net you a nice profit, but I am not suggesting, nor am I recommending, that you enter the competition, at least not at the present time.

You might consider competing at some time in the future, perhaps, after the Irishman (O’bama) gets us through this recession—or compression, possession, confession, depression—whatever this afflicted, infected, neglected and projected economic situation is called—it’s probably a combination of all the above.

Hey, here’s a thought—you might be able to make a deal with the Dollar Store to let you fake it. Unleash the kids, give them 30 minutes to fill up as many baskets as their can, up to the value of their combined accounts, video their efforts, then make them put everything back.

Considering the fact that your attorney husband can draw up some sort of binding contract for you and the store to sign, you would have a leg up (so to speak) on others entering the competition.

You couldn’t and shouldn’t tell the kids that the whole thing would be a scam—for one thing, they wouldn’t know what a scam is, and if you explained it to them they would refuse to cooperate—and even if they did cooperate, the spontaneous nature of their shopping efforts would be lost and you wouldn’t win the prize.

And if you were to win the prize you would have to split the money with the store in accordance with your contract, and you would have to suffer the wrath of the kids when they learned that you had fooled them, and no amount of prize money would help your case—not one iota—not one bit—not even one teeny weeny bit.

However, if you captured their wrath on video and combined it with the video of their shopping spree, then the big prize could well be yours.

Think about it.

Nah—bad idea—forget about it—or as they say in Noo Yawk, fuh geda bow dit.

I’m sorry I even thought of it.

No amount of money could compensate for the loss of your children’s trust.

Just forget the whole thing.

And then again, on second thought . . .