This past spring, when the new Pokemon game was announced for release this coming October and we learned that it was going to be made exclusively for the 3DS, I made a deal with Sparky. If, I said, he could save up half of the cost of the unit, we would pay the other half.

He has put every penny of his allowance into his piggy bank, put gift money in there, did extra chores around the house for money above and beyond his allowance for the usual chores he does, returned bottles and cans for the deposit money, and as of yesterday he had saved up just shy of his goal. As there was a good sale on this week, I said he’d just about done it, and so we made a date to pick it up this weekend. He would take any colour, he said, any at all; although purple was his first choice and black his second, he’d even take pink, he said earnestly. We assumed those were the only colours on sale, as they were the only three pictured in the ad.

The first store we went to was sold out and told us rather shortly that they had a limited quantity and if they were gone, they were gone. (Not only did this tick us off, because the ad had said nothing about limited quanities, it sent Sparky into a panic, despite having been told about rainchecks before we’d left.) The second store we went to had none left on the shelves, but when we asked, the clerk said she had one unit left behind the counter. It was red.

We are very, very proud of him. This was his first big test of will, saving up for something specific rather than just saving up money in general and then wandering through a store to see what he could buy with that amount. It wasn’t easy; there were several times that he pleaded to buy something, and I explained over and over that if he used some of the money in his bank he’d have to wait even longer for the 3DS. But he did it, and now he can start saving up for something else.

It’s charging up right now in its neat little cradle (oh, the agony of waiting another couple of hours!). He very proudly handed my DS back to me as we unpacked his new one. I think I’ll have find a secondhand Pokemon game so we can trade things back and forth and have battles. He’d love that.

I wish the photo of him beaming so hard that his teeth are bared and his eyes are squinched shut hadn’t turned out too blurry to use. You’ll just have to imagine the unbridled joy on his face instead.