Present Flop

So today I headed out to my brother's house to hang out with my nephews and stuff At the last minute I decided to pick up some little holiday gifts to be a good uncle and whatever. Unfortunately it was way too last minute to be running around.

I wandered down Smith Street and I stopped in at one place and got these cool wild windup bug toys. Bought two of them. One for each nephew. Then I stopped in another place and bought two 'Brooklyn' t-shirts so the nephews could represent. At the next place I bought a toy medical kit for the older nephew. One gift to go. The younger one likes choo choo trains alot so I kept an eye out for train stuff. But store after store... no train anything. It was getting late and I started to hustle around. Finally I saw a big book in a gift store called 'I Dream of Trains'.  It had a big train on the cover. So I bought the book quick and had it wrapped up.

When I got out there I started busting out the little gifts. The windup toys went over fairly well but the younger one had trouble winding em up and one broke. The t-shirts went over like a lead balloon. T-shirts don't do much for kids at all. Especially shirts with just words on it. Then the older one opened up his medical kit gift and really got psyched. He started playing with the plastic stethoscope all excited. Then I turned to the little one and saw him struggling with the wrapping paper and realized I made a bad error. I'm usually really good with little gifts (my last gifts over thanksgiving were a coolio jack-in-the-box and a little cowboy guitar) so I'm usually pretty good with stuff. But as the wrapping paper came off this gift I knew I made a mistake. It was just a book! What the hell was I thinking? I saw him looking at the book all confused. Like how does it turn on? There's a catch, right?

I rushed over to try and spin it. Because I assumed the book was all about trains I started frantically flipping pages for him to show him some trains. I soon realized this book was WAY too old for him considering he can't read and it was filled with words. But also it really wasn't even a book about trains! It was the story of a poor black child who hangs out by the railroad tracks and dreams of trains and better times. It was more about race relations than trains. The illustrations were mainly dark and stormy and not many had trains in em. The little one shot me a look like 'WTF! WTF with this F-in book!' I didn't know what to say. I wanted to run out straight away to the toy store and buy him a whole trainset or whatever to make up for it. But it was too late. He soon after called me 'Uncle Doody.'

So I learned a lesson. That I really need to be more careful when buying stuff for the boys regardless of the occasion so it's always even steven. Always gotta be fair. I mean if you buy something wrong for an adult they smile and pretend they like it (usually). But if you buy something wrong for a kid you can catch a new nickname like 'Uncle Doody' lickitysplit. .. and it might stick.

Lessons learnt.

ok bye!

tOdd