Collecting Pokemon Cards

So much for pennies.

I wrote last week about my son wanting to collect pennies and how we used that as motivation to get him to dramatically reduce the snorting he has been doing.

But after a few days, he lost interest in the pennies. Perhaps he caught wind of the debt crisis and figured out that his pennies won’t be worth anything in a few years anyway.

Without the motivation to collect pennies, Kai’s snorting returned, though not as much as before.

It again made us wonder if the snorting is a tic that can be controlled for short periods of time, but sooner or later will emerge again.

This past weekend, Kai told Mom that he was interested in collecting Pokemon cards. He showed some interest in them before when he saw his cousins in Virginia play with their cards. But, he hadn’t mentioned the cards again until this weekend. I think his renewed interest is because some of the kids in his class have them.

And so, this weekend, we told Kai that he could earn a Pokemon card for every hour he went without snorting.

I had a stack of cards that one of his cousins had given me back when he saw how fascinated Kai was. I had never given them to Kai because I couldn’t figure out how to play the game and didn’t want to deal with Kai’s frustration of not being able to play. But, for now, he only seems interested in collecting the cards and not in playing the game.

I think Kai likes the Pokemon cards because they have numbers that indicate each character’s respective strengths and weaknesses. The colors and pictures of the amusing looking characters also are attractive. He has never seen any of the videos.

So, with Pokemon on the line, Kai snorted only once the whole weekend. I went through nearly the entire collection of cards that my nephew had given me.

My wife had to rush out on Monday morning to get more cards. I think we were the only people in America who did not know where to get Pokemon cards so we were in a mild panic about not finding any. But, it turns out that they are available everywhere.

My wife got two decks with 60 cards per deck. That should last a good long time, I thought.

As I handed Kai his first card from the new deck, I expected that he would be excited.

But before he even looked at the card, he said that he now wanted to collect Yu-Gi-Oh cards instead.

Sigh. Do they have those at ToyRUs?