William is 13, and I don’t think there’s any avoiding the Gift Letdown thing that happens sometime around that age. Little kids want TOYS and they’re so EXCITED and HAPPY. Older kids can find there isn’t really anything they want, and if they DO think of things they want, those things aren’t as exciting as they remembered Christmas gifts being. It’s a problem. I combat it by talking about it all the time, until it’s possible I’m making it happen by discussing it.

Anyway, as we got closer to Christmas, William did manage to put together a list. I jumped on any idea that seemed like it was something to PLAY with, but a lot of his gifts were more like what an adult might ask for.

 

Kinetic sand. Paul texted me from a craft store, saying William was riveted by a kinetic sand display. I looked into a few nice-looking kits with names like KrayZSand that came with trays and molds and so forth, but the reviews were poor: people were saying things like “Just get the real kinetic sand.” So I got what I hope was “the real” kinetic sand. Reviewers also mentioned helpfully that it was necessary to have a lap-sized sandbox if you wanted to PLAY with the kinetic sand, so I went to Target and bought a flattish $7-ish lap-sized 11×14-inch Sterilite bin with a snap-on-with-tabs lid (it looks like the shallower bins shown here, if you work better from a visual), so that the sand could be played with and also CAREFULLY-STORED-please-don’t-spill-this-all-over-the-house. This stuff is really cool and also definitely a TOY type thing. It would be a good gift for an adult, too. Two pounds, by the way, is not a huge quantity. Picture a one-pound box of brown sugar; now picture two.

 

Water pearls / polymer beads. They’re tiny little hard plastic balls, and when you put them in water they expand to many times their original size: like, from the size of a small stud earring to the size of a small gumball. As they dry out, they shrink back down. William got these from Christmas last year or the year before, when I didn’t realize the things he’d seen on a cool YouTube science video were THE SAME THING as vase-filling water pearls, so I paid about four times the price for about 1/100th the quantity. Well, they were fun anyway, and at the time William was a little starry-eyed about Steve Spangler so it was probably worth it to get the branded ones, and actually now that I’ve bought HUGE GIANT CHEAP BAGS of the non-branded kind, I’m a little wishing we didn’t have so MANY. There’s one thing in the question section where someone says “How many beads does it make?” and someone replies, “I don’t really know, but I used a 5-gallon bucket and they overflowed all over the floor.” So, like, don’t make them all at once. Just a few at a time. Anyway, I got him a bag each of clear and assorted colored. They are less of a hit this time (the novelty has worn off somewhat), but still something to play with.

 

Pusheen t-shirt. We are very fond of Pusheen around here, and this shirt happens to say the same thing William says when I ask him to unload the dishwasher.

 

Spanish stuff. You guys helped me with this! I found the recommendations SO INTERESTING to read, and came away with that happy “the internet is people, and people are GREAT” feeling I always get when I ask a question thinking I’ll be lucky if one person knows, and instead there are dozens and dozens who know. We all have such unplumbed depths, don’t we? So many skills the others don’t even know about!

Where was I? Oh yes! So what I finally did was, I went with what his Spanish teacher recommended, because it sounded like there was nothing that was exactly what he was asking for, and there were a lot of people who added support to her recommendations, and it took away the issue of “Is it the same kind of Spanish he’s learning in school?” and so forth. Then I added two more things. So altogether I bought Merriam-Webster’s Spanish-English Dictionary, Barron’s 501 Spanish Verbs, a pocket-sized Merriam-Webster because I could picture him liking to keep that in his backpack, and a Spanish Word-a-Day calendar. I didn’t count all these against his gift budget, because frankly if he’d asked for any of the first three to help him in school I would have just bought them for him. If he sustains his interest, my plan is to add some of the other dictionaries/books people mentioned, because what I noticed is that a lot of the Spanish experts were saying they liked to have an assortment of dictionaries for different purposes and for getting different perspectives on a particular word, and that is how I would feel about it too.

 

Sign language stuff. William is in the sign language club at school, and asked for some sign language dictionaries. My mom was an elementary school teacher and used sign language a lot for songs and programs, so I asked for her input—and ended up sitting at the table surrounded by books, hearing a careful run-down of the pros and cons of every single one. I finally chose the two that appealed to me the most while seeming the most generally useful: Signing: How to Speak with Your Hands, and The American Sign Language Phrase Book. The first one has been updated over the years, but the pictures are still drawings from the ’70s: turtlenecks, poofy hair on the men, etc. The second one has more cartoony/amusing drawings. The first one is more word-by-word, the second one is phrases.

 

Sonic screwdrivers. My parents got these for him: the 10th and the 12th. We’ve had some bad luck with Dr. Who toys in the past, but William said, “I know these will probably break, but I want them anyway.” He’s in the Dr. Who Fan Club, and said he’d want them as costume props even if they stopped flashing and making noise. So far they are still flashing and making noise.

 

Leatherman tool. I think this was the model he got, but I’m not sure; there are a bunch of different ones. This was my brother’s idea for him. William likes to take stuff apart, and Paul imitated him using his teeth and/or breaking Paul’s pocket knife on a flea market find in the car on the way home. The Leatherman has things like pliers and wire cutters and screwdrivers.