The New Currency

It seems there must have been a lot of snuggling going on back in the summer of ’97 because all of Liam’s friends have birthdays in the April/May time frame.  For my boys; birthday parties seemed to really increase in terms of numbers around age 5.  I suspect this is mostly due to kids starting school and having a sizable pool of friends to invite.  When I think about this I feel sorry for Keegan who has a September birthday and won’t really know any of the kids in his class well enough to invite.  

A couple of years ago the golden gift was BeybBlades, when they went on sale Y and I would buy them by the case and save them for birthday distribution over the year. After Beyblades it was Battle B’damons and so forth and so on.

These days the modern 8-year-old currency is EB Gift Cards.  These can be used to purchase a fast variety of used video games. It is nice as a parent because you never have to worry about what you are going to buy. Never trying to guess what a kid would like, or worrying another person bought the same gift.  Also there seems to be 4 EB games within a 5km radius of where I work and live.  The downside is that they never go on sale so you are kinda stuck at a base present price for every birthday.

I was out driving at lunch to pick up a game card for tonight’s birthday party when I had this absurd image of an entire economy fueled by 8 year olds. Game cards as currency exchanging hands in a frenzy of buying and selling of used games. Central to this is the Bank of EB, setting commodity rates on the prices of games, announcing rate adjustments to help stimulate the economy.