Cars: Are you addicted too?

Disney and Pixars "Cars" was a great movie. So great that :noah: seems to have become addicted to it. If he could watch it all the time - not that we have it on DVD (yet) - he would.

The problem is, what to get him for Christmas. We started off with a couple of the diecast cars. Then we discovered that some of the cars are more collectible than others. So collectible that some of the cars - that sell for $3.99 or so in stores - are selling for $30+ on eBay. THAT'S NUTS!

Gradually, I was surfing eBay, trolling for the cars we needed, hoping that I might be able to find one for a reasonable price, hoping that I wouldn't be outbid. Occasionally we were successful, but every now and then someone sniped us in the last minute. We would agree not to buy any more, but then one of us would break. It wasn't pretty.

The other day, Jen had gone shopping in the morning before going to a doctors appointment. She wasn't able to find one of the few things we still needed - after giving up on a couple of cars, of course. She went to the usual places to try to find the "Disney/Pixar Cars 'Piston Cup' Race Track Set" but had failed. I was sent online to more of the usual suspects to get it. And I did - finding it for even cheaper online, even with the shipping. Awesome. Most of the discussion about it happened, of course, via text messaging. Even better.

Suffice it to say that, at this point, we're pretty much all in on this and going for broke - figuratively. I asked Jen about this the other day - the fact that we seem to be hellbent on getting Noah all the toys in the set. She seems to think that it stems from the disappointment we felt ourselves as kids, when, hoping that we'd get everything in the set that we'd asked for, we only got the one little set, and even then, it was rarely the one we really wanted in the first place.

Note to mom and dad: I'm not trying to say anything about past gifts, just reflecting on Christmas' past. As a parent now, I can understand the urge to get your kid every set in the (insert current cool toy line here) series, but I can also understand the reasons for not doing so - economic and sheer lack of space to put things coming to mind first, but also teaching some degree of patience and self-reliance down the road.

Anyway, hopefully the Cars-a-palooza will be counter-balanced by whatever he gets from other family and friends. But we'll just have to wait and see.