Claw Machine Fun in KL
The Christmas present that delivered more than what we expected
One of the Christmas presents we got Shelby was a bag of tokens for the claw machines at the mall under us in Kuala Lumpur. She loves claw machines, even though she knows they’re rigged. Since the tokens were so cheap, we were able to get her a bunch knowing that the fun would be in the pursuit of trying to get something and not in actually winning anything.
Well, she didn’t use the tokens right away and, in fact, as we were getting ready to leave KL, she still hadn’t used them! So I ran down with her on our last night at the KL AirBNB for some fun. As suspected, she ran through the tokens pretty quickly at first without winning anything. And then she won a small stuffy/toy, which fit in the palm of her hand. Perfect.
But she still had some tokens remaining and decided to try for one of the bigger stuffies, just for fun — because why not?
You can see where this is going, right?
She won a stuffed Stitch (from Lilo & Stitch) that was probably 18” tall! I didn’t get it on video because by then I had videoed so many failed attempts that it didn’t make sense to keep recording them. But on this attempt, the claw went down, firmly grabbed the body of Stitch, and pulled the stuffy up, without dropping it, and delivered it to Shelby. We looked at each other, stunned, and burst out laughing! What were the odds?! Small, of course. But now she had a massive stuffed animal and nowhere to put it! We were checking out the next day!
I immediately suggested that she give it to a worldschooling family and she shunned the idea. Like, how dare I suggest she give away something she had won that was effectively her Christmas present? Silly me. So I told her she had to find a way to pack him.
Well, friends, let me tell you: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. She managed to make room for him in her backpack (yes, he took up basically the whole space), moving things from her backpack to her suitcase. It was impressive. The kid has developed mad packing skills as we’ve traveled. So Stitch made the journey with us to Penang and our plan from there was to ship him to the US, along with all the snacks and candy S had been collecting across different countries for her friends back home.
Well, we hit a snag with this plan and I’ll be you know what it is: Cost. It was prohibitively expensive to ship everything overseas. I can’t remember now, but even the cheapest way was going to be over USD$80. Um, no. The value of all the contents didn’t even equal half of that!
Shelby was crushed. I again suggested that we find a worldschooling family to give Stitch to and she again refused. When that kid sets her mind to something, it’s hard to shake her. (I suppose most of us are like that, though.) She managed to transport Stitch to Thailand and then Japan (Tokyo and Kyoto) and then back to the US, where we offloaded him and her snack haul with her friends. But when she won Stitch, we didn’t even know that we’d be flying back through the US, so she really took a gamble on getting him “home.”
I guess this is what happens when you buy your child claw machine tokens for Christmas thinking she won’t actually win anything with them. Ha! What have you acquired on your travels that you had to either find a way to make room for or part with due to space constraints?