He turned to look at me, his smile wide but his eyes flickering in panic.

“I hear they’re already out of the new Switches,” his support worker had just said to me, as he stood in the hallway with my son.

I looked at the support worker then back at my son.

“Yep, already gone,” I confirmed my son’s lie.

My son had been saving for the latest Nintendo Switch for months.

The big windfall had come on his birthday, bringing his total to the $745 needed to buy it.

Only he couldn’t.

In the weeks after his birthday, he couldn’t even bring himself to count his money.

When he finally did, a day was set to travel into the city to make the big purchase.

His agitation the night before was nearly akin to the bad old days of ‘sunday-night-before-school’.

(No, I doubt it’ll ever again be that bad.)

Needless to say, he didn’t get out of bed the next morning.

Days later, I found playing with the old Switch.

“I’ve got a good plan Mum,” he declared. “I’m going through all my old Switch accounts and deleting every profile we don’t use so when I get the new one I can just transfer the one account across instead of all of them.”

“Such a great plan,” I agreed. “Makes so much sense.”

Over the following weeks, I muted questions from relatives about whether he’d spent his birthday money yet.

I gave his psychologist a heads up that he was struggling with the demand of spending his birthday money, or buying the gadget he wanted, or both.

She told me she tried to weave it into their conversation but he headed it off by saying I was going to buy it for him using his money so it was all sorted.

One night he called me into the garage – which has been transformed into a sensory and gaming space just for him.

“Look mum,” he said, gesturing to the screen.

It was some sort of menu and meant nothing to me.

“They’re all gone,” he said, excitedly.

“What are?”

“The other profiles. Only one to transfer to the new Switch now.”

Uh oh.

We were back at ‘time to buy’ stage, I guessed.

Fortunately for me, for now, I was wrong.

“Mum, I think we should paint the garage,” he said.

” Then I want to set up some new shelves and get a new beanbag.

“After that, I’ll buy the Switch.”