Some praises need to be sung for the people that hang out here.

A few weeks (maybe months at this point) Sheik Sheck offered to send me something for Sam and I got this a short time later:

This is a ZImbabwean P-9, 100 ZWD note. It's one of the few first dollar notes I didn't have a PMG graded example of. It also happens to be the series 2 note that has an image of elephants in the lower corner that is mirrored on the front and back of the note (elephants being the theme we chose for Sam's nursery and Ben's original favorite animal at the zoo - now he's obsessed with lions and tigers). The other notes feature different animals, like giraffe's and rhinos. I'd been trying to figure out which one, if any, had elephants when I got this in the mail and saw it. That is sitting in a small currency album for now. I'm debating either leaving it in there or putting it in a small floating mount frame and letting them look at it on the wall as they get older.

Another member had been sending me messages about and talking to me about the Zimbabwean notes - I won't name them because they don't post publicly so far as I can tell so I'm going to respect that. A friend of his gave him a pair of uncirculated Zimbabwean 100 Trillion notes along with some German hyperinflation notes from the early 1920s. I told him to buy that guy a drink if he sells the 100 trillion notes because he can get about $100-200 a piece for them. I also jokingly said that I was jealous of the German notes because I love hyperinflation notes in general and would be looking to get some of those one day. He didn't really want to keep them and didn't want to go through the effort to sell them so he offered to let me have them. USPS turned getting them into an adventure in the worst way possible but I'll avoid going off on that rant / tangent. I got them just recently. 

I think this may be one of the few times my wife has genuinely found something like this neat (she studied German in High School).

He also sent these with the notes for Sam / the boys.

I'll call them "replicas" and not "fakes" - they're actually marked to indicate that they aren't real. According to the sender, they were a in friend's father's collection and he had a habit of buying things off infomercials while drunk - but the rest of his collection, which was real, went for $20,000+ when he helped the son sell it. Moral of the story: Don't watch infomercials while drunk? 

I could see Ben more so than Sam having some fun with these at the moment. Sam will probably like them in 2-3 years - though, he is a baby and the are shiny. Since I have the real things too these may ultimately be used as fun teaching tools.

I really appreciate those of you who read these things and like them, and I love that there are people out there in this community that just freely offer and share things like this. I think this kind of thing deserves props.