Wednesday, May 23, 2012

WFMW - Keeping track of the stylus

My kids got DS Lite's for Christmas a few years ago.  They don't play them often (we don't do a whole lot of electronics at home), but will take them on long car trips. After the first two trips and loosing two styluses as well as one of the girls chewing on the stylus and then swapping it with her sister's, and the constant tears from the back seat when someone dropped a stylus and couldn't reach it, I finally had enough.

I took a length of nylon crochet thread, feed it through the narrow slit in the end of the stylus and knotted the stylus on.  Then, the other end, I took through the hinge in the Nerf case (love this case by the way, the DS's have been dropped a couple of times and are still ok), and knotted it there.  The string is long enough (18 inches maybe?) that they still are able to use the stylus unrestricted, but now we're not needing to replace them.  The girls like it better too because if they drop it in the car, they can get it back and keep playing.

Tip: if you take a narrow strip of card stock, fold it in half and put the end of the string inside the fold of the paper, you can feed the card stock through that little slit and pull the string through easier.  Basically a simple needle threader.

I haven't looked at other DS styluses to see if they've all got that slit, but the DS Lite ones do.  And if you don't have a case to attach it to, maybe you can catch it in the battery door? or duct tape it on?

This is definitely working for us.  Check out more tips at We Are that Family.

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