Xmas gifts

Havoc has been talking about some of the kids in his class and some on the bus who have little MP3 players.

Kindergartners with MP3 players....oh-kay.

I thought I was a few years away from this. Not so much the kids having the MP3 player as taking it to school & back.  My kids are always losing and or breaking things so the idea that I might give them some expensive electronics to take out of the house & away from my help just never crossed my mind.

But then I found a $9 1GB MP3 player that has 4 buttons. OH! OKAY! See, I'm not up on the technology at the lower end of the price & size scale. Last time I went looking for a player it had to have at least 40GB and play videos (and not be an iPod because while I will surrender to Google running the online world I am not surrendering to iPod controlling the music & video world. Plus the software uses to damn much RAM) So I had no idea you could get them that cheap & easy to use.

I though getting Havoc one for Xmas and loading it with the music of mine that he likes plus a new kiddie CD of his choice, would be a nice gift. 

Then feature creep began.

Maybe get one for Mayhem too (though it stays in the house).

That adds another $9

Havoc can read short words & Mayhem knows his letters. So since they really can't read a text screen it is unnecessary. But I'd like it to have one. They will be able to read eventually and understanding frequently seen words is a matter of pattern recognition. I'm only putting about 20 songs on the thing, not the 500 it can hold. So I think it would be helpful if they had a text screen saying the song title.

I've just added $5-10 to the single player costs.

Plus I want to put some kiddie audiobooks from the library on them. They like listening to them in the car & on the CD player in the house. 

I'm going to have to convert the library CD tracks or make sure the player can play that format and it will definitely need to be able to have folders to keep the book altogether & not mix in the music with it

I've added another $10-20 to the player cost.

Then I remembered my audible account. Audible has kids books and I get 2 books a month for $17 (legacy account, I've been with them since 2002). I could get one book for them & one for me every month. Audible is not compatible with all players.

I've added another $25-35 to the cost of the player

Lets talk about headsets for a minute.  The ones that come with the player are either easily broken headsets or adult sized unpadded earbuds. Ear Candy earbuds with sizeable pads are $15

I somehow went from one $9 MP3 player to 2 $65 minimum MP3 players.

I decided this probably was not going to happen. I have about $175 left in the Xmas budget and I want to get my folks a digital photo frame - a nice one with 256mb of built in memory. I figured I'd keep my eyes open on Black Friday & maybe I'd find a cheap MP3 that met some of my feature creep and hopefully get lucky on frame

Then I found this while browsing current sales at Deals of America. It's a refurb but it meets all the feature creep, plus it's 2GB & shows photos. I checked at SanDisk and I can download the manual & software (not included) from them free. I then found a View Sonic photo frame with 256GB, that sells for $130-180, for only $95. Free shipping on both!

So that is done. 

Now I just need to find Mayhem a cheap, small, not too noisy remote controlled dinosaur. I've seen them for about $20 some places.

I'm monitoring DVD prices. I want to get Wall-E and Kung-fu Panda. But I want to pay less than $15 each for them, right now the cheapest is $19. I'm also watching Wii games.  I know Wii Music and the various Lego games are not going to come down enough for me but I live in hope.