Maintaining state in a pagination handler
I think you have the right approaches, however, you can generalize your implementations, for example, on the second approach:

function installHandler ( that, eventName, userOneTime, userRegular ) {
    that.on(eventName, function ( event ) {
        that.off(eventName).on(eventName, userRegular);
        userOneTime ( event );
        userRegular ( event );
    });
}

installHandler ( $(this), "click", 
    function () { alert ("special click"); }, 
    function () { alert ("regular click"); } );