Fifteen already

Last week, Game Fanatic reached the milestone of completing his fifteenth year. In no time at all he will be an adult. Here in Australia he’s now old enough to watch movies and play games that are rated M or MA. Celebrations were pretty low-key with family visiting on the day before (Sunday). This was planned specifically to get the anxiety and stress he experiences out of the way ahead of time. I think it worked pretty well in the end. He really wanted to wait for his birthday to open presents but some really wanted to see him open presents. So he opened those from the family. That night he was lamenting that he’d not have much to open on his birthday since he was expecting one thing from us. I think he was pleasantly surprised the next day when he had not one, but four presents from us. Game Fanatic creates a birthday and Christmas wish list each year with considerable care and we mostly stick to his list when buying gifts as he’s not terribly fond if being surprised. I managed to find two games from his list secondhand at EB Games on the weekend at a lower price than expected. One was a very rare game that I just lucked out finding. I’d also bought him a copy of Watership Down, one of his favorite books, from Book Depository a while back when purchasing Asterix books for his brother. I decided to keep that as a small surprise gift and I think he was quite pleased to get it. There were a couple of occasions where we were in a book shop  recently where he’d gone looking for it so it was a relief that it wasn’t in stock any of those times. The last gift was a copy of Life of Brian by Monty Python, another surprise. He spent most of his birthday playing the game he’d been given the day before while waiting for his dad to get home from work (early). The rest of the day was spent trying out the new games and spending time with the immediate family. He’d be unlikely to express the feeling, but I think he had a really nice day this year.