I did Elizabeth’s gift post, so now it’s time for Edward’s. Edward wanted mostly things from the category of “A Teenaged Boy on YouTube Said It Was Awesome.” We started with a Kaos Tie-Not water-balloon pump:

The big selling point is that it helps you tie the balloons so you do not have to ask your poor mother to keep doing it. Because he had gone back and forth between the portability of the pump system and the no-refilling-needed of the hose system, I also got him the hose-attached version, so he could compare. Plus a 500-balloon refill pack. (The balloons claim to be biodegradable, but I don’t know what kind of timeline they mean. Like…in a “just go ahead and leave those scraps in the grass” kind of way? Or more like in a “if the world’s history is a clock, mankind has only been here for 2 minutes of the last 12 hours” kind of way?)

 

Next cool item from a YouTube video: water beads.

These are pretty cool, but it’s funny to me that they’re also vase fillers. Teenaged boys and vase fillers do not seem like a natural pairing. Anyway, you put a SMALL NUMBER of these tiny hard plastic beads into a large bowl of water (or a vase), and they expand considerably and become all soft and squooshy. You can theoretically then let them dry out and watch them shrink back to tiny beads.

 

Next, a video game teenaged boys recorded themselves playing, and then posted those recordings on YouTube where my children for some reason enjoy watching them:

New Super Mario Bros for the Wii.

 

I do not understand Pokemon; when a child wants something Pokemon, I write down EXACTLY what they tell me and then I see if the price is a price I am willing to pay. Edward wanted something called an ies Aurorus-EX Box Pokemon Card Game:

 

I bought this impulsively when it was on sale at Target:

ThinkFun Code Master game. ThinkFun is a brand I trust; the box design is supposed to bring Minecraft to mind and Edward loves Minecraft; and it’s about programming/logic and Edward likes programming/logic.

 

The Lincoln Penny Portrait kit was one of the things he wanted most, and my parents got it for him:

They also gave him the eighteen rolls of pennies he would need to complete the poster. I bought even more rolls to have on hand in case the rolls don’t have the right proportions of dark/shiny pennies in them.

 

He also wanted Trapdoor Checkers, but the price was too high at the time I was shopping, so I’m saving the idea for later:

 

And also I found this game that is like a combination of his interest in checkers and his interest in coins:

American Coin Treasures Lincoln Coin Checkers set. But $30 seemed too high for a gift that was a total guess, so I put it in my Amazon cart so I’d remember to ask him about it near Christmas time.