So my five-year-old, somehow my youngest, child gets fixations, whereupon he dwells upon one concept or another for weeks. This month’s obsession: Where he’ll have his next birthday party. Which is amusing, as he’s got until next spring to decide. He’s considered parties at the local bouncy house (bouhaus?) and at the Ozark Community Center (somehow abbreviated by its marketing team to “The OC” because appropriating southern California slang is hip).
However, amid his musings, he announced he wants an Ambush party.
That’s not his five-year-old way of saying a surprise party. He means an Ambush party.
He wants a party themed around the game Ambush:
I bought the game at a garage sale a while back, and it’s gathered dust on the game shelves until such time as the children could get out games and make up their own little games and sagas that they do. This particular game comes with a couple of hex maps and a pile of little cardboard markers with jeeps, tanks, explosions, and other game-related nomenclature upon them.
The boys love it. They set up little battles, and they go through them with all the zeal of Patton and the verisimilitude of Tarantino.
So the laddie wants a party centered on this particular little game. Or so he does immediately after they play with it. I doubt we’ll have to actually come up with a party centered on small unit combat in France, 1944, as this obsession will pass and by the time next spring rolls around we’ll arbitrarily pick something for his party.
One thing I know he won’t be getting for his birthday: another copy of Ambush. We recently considered getting another copy to put up until they’re older in case they want to play it with all the pieces (many of the individual units are being removed from the battlefield by the Vacuum Redeployment (VR)). But it’s sixty to one hundred dollars on eBay.
Suddenly, I’m the kind of callous, unfeeling member of the 1%-wanna-be crowd that I cavalierly let my children play with and destroy $100 games. How did that happen?
