Think My Mom Would Love This? Birthday Card Surprise!

My mom has been on a bit of a Pokemon Go binge for the last...few years. So I thought I would make something that would connect with what she really likes.

For the past few years, I have been working on doing better on 1) getting birthday cards done on time and 2) getting them to the recipient on time. I have either had it way completed and forgot to give it to them until way after, or give it to them 6 months later because it took me that long to get to it or remember. Skip to last year: managed to get a card out to everyone on their bday! (some maybe a few days late at most?) But a huge success with my side of the family (only having four other members to remember). I tend to do a little more detailed stuff for them. Marrying into another 9 in-laws was too much. But I still send them cards. Last year I made them items from foam boards (I'll try to do a post on those later). This year I wanted it a little more complex: I wanted movement. John was also going to help me with the mechanics so this would be pretty easy to do, but most likely time-consuming. What you see on the right are the pieces that make up the body of the device. This was made back in December 2020, with my hopes of having almost 2 months to work on this. At this point, I also realized that my sister's birthday was actually before my mom's birthday. Like a month in advance. By like a week from the day I had finished this.

Now some time had passed until I was able to get back to this. Too much we had to focus on and it ended up being a week before and then the day before my mother's birthday that I got to finish this. Though it isn't accurate, I am quite proud of putting this much effort into a birthday gift! (And have it be successful!)

Finally after putting it all together:

And yes, the wheels do work!

What do you think? Would you make something like this? If not pokemon with what?

This took us about 7 hours total? If you include both of our time working on it. I am thinking down the road I might do a tutorial on this to help make it in only 3 hours depending on your complexity!