Last year we contemplated buying Joe’s daughter a Gameboy Advance SP for Christmas, but didn’t do it for various reasons, the main one being his ex-wife was going to buy the boy one too, and he’s rather irresponsible with his belongings. I guess I’m a hypocrite now because not only did we buy her one, we bought the boy one too. They won’t know about it until next weekend, though, since we had to switch weekends because the girl’s friend invited her to a sleepover this weekend.
There are three reasons I’ve changed my stance on the issue since October:
1) Joe’s daughter informed us that she’s been saving up the money she’s been getting for Christmas and various holidays to buy herself one and we don’t really want her spending part of her savings on a toy.
2) The boy has actually gotten better at taking care of his Gameboy Color, plus he really wants a GBA SP too, and who can blame him? They are cool!
3) They were cheap!
See, last night we got a Meijer ad in the mail advertising some ‘doorbuster’ sales that started this morning at 6 am and one of the items was the GBA SP for only $49.99. That’s a steal considering all the stores, including those online, sell it for $79.99. The limit was one per person so we both headed there bright and early this morning and got one for each of the kids (red for the girl, silver for the boy). I have to tell you, I’m pretty excited to see their reactions, particularly because we make it a point not to buy them toys all the time for no reason so they totally won’t be expecting it.
The only beef I have, besides the fact that Meijer’s computers needed “reprogramming” after 6 am to take the discounted price, thus causing me to almost be late for work and making Joe late, was that it’s pretty obvious that the red GBA SP was opened before. It seems to work fine, but it irks me nonetheless. I didn’t pay for a used unit, I paid for a brand new one. Since we knew Meijer was all out of stock, we tried to exchange it at Walmart. Can you believe that they can tell what store it was purchased from just by scanning the thing? They informed us we’d have to exchange it at Meijer. Doh! Hopefully they will get more in stock before the kids come over in a week or so.
Anyway, after being turned down by Walmart, we checked a couple of used game stores so we could get the kids some games, but even those were rather pricey. We checked Target to see what they carried for under $20. Not much really. We got a Star Wars game for the boy, but I have no idea what to get the girl. They’d both love a Pokemon game, and as you know, they make 2.5 billion of them, but they were all $30+ and if I refuse to pay more than $20 for a PS2 game, I sure as heck not paying that for a little Gameboy game.
We also went looking for these cool miniature backpack cases that hold both the system and a few games so they can keep their gear protected, but there was only one left in stock at Circuit City in all black. We got that one, but it looks like I’ll be going out at lunch tomorrow to check the one by my work so we can get another. It seems like all the stores carry the backpack, but it says Nintendo DS on it, and that’s dumb since that’s not what they have.