Must haves...

I've already talked about how Sam liked to keep up with personal transport fads, and I've briefly mentioned his love of fashionable clothing (particularly surf labels).
But there was one other area where Sam liked to keep up with trends and fads. Like most other children, he liked the latest toys.

Perhaps he got it from me (or his father, we both have that kind of nature), but once he latched onto something, he wanted more and more of it (actually, when I think of it, Oliver is the same too).

I guess the first real 'collection' was tigers. From an early age, Sam loved tigers, and he had lots of soft and fluffy tigers. He still had them sitting on top of his cupboard the day he died.
His favourite was 'Gritty Kitty', which sits on the top shelf of his 'shelf' in the lounge room:
Just like Oliver (and Anthony!), Sam went through a Lego phase. His main 'sets' were the Star Wars and Harry Potter ones; and for a while he was really into Bionicles. He didn't spend quite as much time on it as Oliver and Anthony, but he did build a lot cool stuff.

Another big fad that Sam got sucked into was the Beyblade phenomenon (which I was very surprised to find out, is still going in some countries!)
Beyblades were these spinning tops that you 'launched' into an arena against another person's top. Whichever one fell over first was the loser.
Samuel (and many other children) got very excited about the whole Beyblade thing, and bought lots of them. When he asked for an arena (a flimsy plastic thing that went for about $40), Anthony built him a wooden version, complete with a place to store all the toys:
I took the photo today, so as you can see, he had kept all the toys safe and secure, despite not playing with them for at least 5 years!

Another toy fad that Samuel got REALLY involved in was Yu-Gi-Oh! Which was a trading card game that was always way too confusing for me to understand, but somehow easy for 9 year-olds to play! Samuel and his friends (mainly Patrick) would sit for hours playing and refining their decks. Sam must have spent hundreds of dollars on the cards, and from what I can tell, he had a pretty good collection (which is still around here somewhere!)

His other major collection, which are technically not toys, is his massive rock collection.
For a long time, Samuel was very interested in rocks and shells. We really thought he was going to go into geology, and in fact, science was probably his best school subject. This box is most of his collection of smaller rocks, including 2.4gms of gold that I bought him for his 10th (I think) birthday. It would have been nice to see where that interest took him...

Of course, by the time Samuel died, he'd moved on to more 'teenage' collections: music, pictures of cars, video games, DVDs...but I like that he kept all his toys too.