Team DS

Alex has been wanting a Nintendo 3DS for well over a year now. Ryan has just been wanting a DS of any kind, even moaning one night how unfair it was that Alex and several of Ryan's friends have DS1s, and he doesn't even have a DS zero.

After much soul searching, we had given Alex a DSi for Christmas in 2010. The prices were marked down that year to $99, in large part due to the fact that the 3DS had just come on the market. We didn't feel Alex needed the 3DS, though, so we weren't worried about him not having the latest and greatest in technology.

Turns out we were wrong, because Nintendo has basically stopped making games for the DS. Pretty much every game he has wanted to buy in the past year, he couldn't, because they could only be played on the 3DS.

Evil thoughts towards Nintendo aside, we felt for him. So we made a deal with him - if he saved up $150 of his own money, we would pay the rest to get him the new system and one new game to start it up. But he had to give his DSi to Ryan.

Alex accepted our challenge, and its been great watching him save his pennies, quarters and dollars, while Ryan goes out and spends his allowance as soon as he gets enough for a new skylander.

Well, Alex finally reached the magical $150 threshold, so right before the boys left for Camp Granny, Carl took Alex 3DS shopping at Target while I took Ryan to Toys R Us.

Ryan picked out one new game, as well as this blue LEGO case for the DS. I also let him get the Batman LEGO stylus. We're trying to treat the DSi hand-me-down like its a BIG DEAL for Ryan, and hopefully buy us his own happiness with the non 3DS (at least until Christmas). I figure at some point he'll realize he can't play the newer games on his DS, but for now, he is so happy to have any kind of DS and not a Leapster, that he isn't complaining.

Alex picked out a sleek gray colored 3DS, and the newest Spiderman game.

He likes that the 3DS games are white, and the other DS games are black.

We have two very happy little boys.

 And I think my favorite part of this whole learning experience is that Ryan is now determined to save up his allowance for something big and special, and not just a new Skylander every other week.

Meanwhile, we're praying that the fact that Nintendo is going to release a XL 3DS in late August doesn't cause us any future problems... but since we don't really let the kids use the DS during the school year, a late August release date does us no good. And I'm banking on the DS to get us through the summer's road trips. Not sure why the powers that be thought the end of summer rather than the beginning of summer was a good target release date, because they've lost our sale because of their bad timing.