Guest Blogger: Black Friday by Sweetie

WalMart's Checkout line

I detest standing in lines…it drives me nuts… makes me kranky…etc…  My dear wife loves a bargain. In the past that has caused some conflict on Black Friday. Luckily, my wife hates early mornings about as much as I hate standing in line, and she doesn’t like confrontations, bad manners or ugly behavior. So after she witnessed one of those ugly incidents of people fighting over an item, she has decided it’s not worth getting up early to see people be rude. So I was a bit surprised on Wednesday when she casually mentioned that she might want to go to Kohl’s Black Friday sale. I just smiled and said, “Whatever you want, Beautiful.” She’s been staying up quite late, and she would never want to get up, so why not pretend to be supportive? That’s when she hit me with “it starts at midnight so we don’t have to get up at 5…” Oh crap, shopping at midnight…she would love that! I guess I was going Black Friday shopping.

As I was looking through the ads, I spied something. I can’t tell you what because, well because ‘tis the season for secrets. Anyway it looked like a screaming deal on something I had been wishing I could find for the past few years. It was on a two-day sale, not a six-hour sale, but it was at WalMart. Having been to WalMart once on Black Friday, I knew better.   Armed with a name and description I headed to the web to find the prize on line. A quick search revealed they weren’t easy to find. There were some on Ebay for roughly 4 times what they were at WalMart. Oh the shining glimmer of hope; they were listed on walmart.com… a quick stroke of the mouse (isn’t it funny how mice and Christmas associations have changed?) and most of my hope was gone. They were currently not available at walmart.com and according to the web they were not stocked in Utah Walmart stores .  WalMart was opening at 10 PM and Kohl’s at midnight. We could quickly run up to WalMart, see if they had the one item, then drive out to Kohl’s. Three hours and I could probably be in bed shortly after 1:00 AM. It was a good plan.

As I approached WalMart, I turned to my wife and said, “I didn’t know the Sam’s Club was open.” She smiled and said, “They’re not.” So the entire WalMart and Sam’s Club parking lots were full. Frustrated people were poring out of the parking lots after vainly searching for a spot.   I should have run…given up…gone home and crawled into bed where I belonged… but just then my wife noticed there were people leaving the store with purchased items. We could follow them for a parking space and a cart! I quickly followed a basket into the Sam’s Club portion of the parking lot, but three other cars were also converging with the same idea. Then I thought I saw a space…nope just the cart return. But maybe...we were driving a little Suzuki Grand Vitara.  It was small and Sam’s Club cart returns are huge…I think I could fit. Sure enough…I had a spot!

On the way in we found a cart.  It was all going to work out ok. Two strangers warned us to turn back, but we kept on walking. Finally we worked our way around and to toys, but no sign of the prize. Desperately, I swallowed my pride and prepared to lose a man card or two and ask for help, but what I wanted were all gone. We should have just walked away then. But wait, my wife had borrowed my daughter’s sewing machine and they were a really good price. We figured the Garden Center would be faster, so we headed for that line. The line took almost two hours. I would leave about every 15 minutes to scavenge for abandoned merchandise and we did end up with a few more items.

As we pulled out of the cart return, I was glad I let my wife drive. I was too tired to think. Then I realized she wasn’t gong  home but to Kohl’s! It’s hard to believe, but Kohl’s was worse than WalMart.  The lines literally covered every major walkway in the store. We decided to stash our finds behind clothes on the clearance racks and come back later…  I thought that meant about 9:00 AM… but evidently the plan was to go back about 2:30 AM.

As we re-arrived at Kohl’s, the lines were now only covering half of the walkways…we had been lucky enough to find a cart… we retrieved our hidden merchandise and picked up a few more. With the lines still halfway down the hall, I succumbed to blackmail. You could get in a shorter line at customer service if you applied for a Kohl’s card… I would do anything to get out of there ASAP.  We had a few issues and by the time we strolled out of the store, there was no line…and it was 4 AM… the regular line for early morning vs. late night Black Friday were forming…thankfully, we were headed to bed.

Oh, one other thing. When we were home waiting for Kohl’s to clear out, I checked walmart.com and was able to get my item at the sale price. I was only slightly annoyed with the hours we had wasted shopping, but then I remembered the thrill of the chase…Besides, I couldn’t park in a cart return on a normal day.

The Corn Maze

The Dog Walker is our resident “decorations” man. He loves holidays and Halloween is one of his favorites. A few years ago my sweetie turned all the holiday decorating over to him. You all know that the Dog Walker is an amazing guy! I don’t know how much you know about autistics, but when they focus on something, nothing else gets done until that particular task is finished. And he can drive us absolutely nuts during the process!

My sweetie is adamant that we can not decorate for Halloween until October 1. So this weekend (once all the rain was over), the Dog Walker dragged out all the Halloween boxes and got busy. The kids were out of school on Friday because of Parent/teacher conferences so he got started bright and early. My sweetie is also off on Fridays so we headed out to run some errands. We reminded the Dog Walker that he could use the corn stalks that had been cut and dried already, but that some of them were still growing in the garden.

After a fun trip to Kohl’s, we returned to the house. The first thing we noticed was the 20 or so fence posts stuck in the front lawn. This didn’t surprise us because we knew that the Dog Walker’s favorite set up was his own corn maze. What did surprise us was the fact that tied around half the posts were green corn stalks! I walked up to one and pulled off a mostly developed ear of corn. My sweetie became a bit unglued when he realized that most of our corn patch was now tied to posts in the front yard.

We headed through the house and into the backyard and caught him with another armful of green stalks. “You weren’t supposed to cut down the good corn!” I accused. He dropped his bundle to the ground, clearly stressed by my tone of voice. “But Mom,” he responded, “I harvested the corn first.” Sure enough about 3 dozen tiny ears of corn were neatly piled in a bowl on my kitchen counter. My sweetie picked a couple more from the front yard and added them to the pile.



Other than his Marching Band competition Saturday and church on Sunday, the Dog Walker didn’t do anything else but work on his display. As you can see, it was fabulous as usual. Just wait till you see what he does for Christmas!

Attack of the Clothes

People ask me all the time how I stay on top of the laundry…it’s easy, the piles never get so high that you would actually get hurt if you fell off. Badaboom! Seriously though, laundry is an issue. 

Baby Doll was born 4 ½ weeks early and we had absolutely nothing that would fit her. She weighed in at a hefty 6 lbs 8 ozs for a preemie, but all the newborn clothes we had were way too big. So while I was still in the hospital, Teach took off for my favorite store (Kohl’s again) and picked up some little preemie things. 

These tiny clothes had a tendency to get lost in the laundry pile. I think she only wore a couple of the shirts once before they were too small. I was sorting through her stuff earlier this week and pulled out a pair of pink flowered stretch pants. It was hard to believe they ever fit over her chubby little thighs. Dance outfits and soccer shirts also tend to get lost in the pile. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten a bit smarter and I pull them out and keep them safely stashed until game day. Then we aren’t madly throwing clean and dirty clothes all over the place 15 minutes before kickoff. 

I also have one laundry basket that is constantly devoted to socks only. About once a month we take the whole basket into the family room, put in a movie and have a sock-folding party. The kids remember this activity fondly because usually it ends up with them matching a pair or two and then getting lost in the movie while Mom folds the rest of the basket. At least they think they are helping… part 2 here.

Gratitude

My little two-year-old Curly is the sweetest thing! This morning I was pulling some bargains out of yet another Kohl’s bag. This time they were pretty much all for 5-year-old Scout; some Princess jammies, a fuzzy pink jacket with fuzzy pink gloves, black and gray leggings. She was happy but not nearly as grateful as I wanted to see her be. 

Meanwhile, Curly stood by my leg and bouncing up and down shouted, "Is there anything for me? Is there anything for me?" I had to keep telling him, "No, this time they are all for Sissy." He was sad, but hung around anyway. Just as he was about ready to head dejectedly down the stairs, I spotted a small navy blue pair of unremarkable sweats that I had pulled out of a bag yesterday and left laying on the tub for him. 

"Hey, Curly, I do have something for you!" He raced back to my bedroom. I felt almost guilty as I held up this one little pair of $2.00 JC Penney sweats. He ran to me, "Are those for me?" he breathed. "Yup! As soon as you go to the potty we’ll put them on." I took his little hand in mine as he half-skipped to the potty. I lifted him up and his small face turned upward to mine. "I’m so excited!" he said. I smiled above his blonde curls. In my heart I promised, "Next time the whole bag will be for you."

Screamin' Deals

I just got back from Kohl’s. It’s my favorite place to look for bargains. With all these kids I have to be a careful shopper, so I am constantly on the lookout. Last week Big Daddy and I spent a couple of hundred dollars on all the clearance toys. That will keep us stocked up for birthdays and even some of Christmas for the next year. But then they had to give me $30.00 in Kohl’s Kash which of course means I had to go back to the store this week. 

I took Bossy with me because she can smell out a bargain anywhere and if she can’t find one, she will ask for one. We left all the kids home but Baby Doll who became extremely heavy somewhere between the 20^th and 25^th clearance racks! Bossy can’t carry the baby because she has to look at every item on every rack. It was about then that I remembered how much I hate shopping with her. 

To her credit she found a nice pair of jeans for Gamer for $2.60. She also rounded up 3 pairs of boys cargo pants for Sport at $5.40 each, and a couple of pairs of earrings for less than a dollar! I found an XXL shirt for the Gym Rat’s birthday for $1.60 and because of a tiny rip in the Levi's I found for him, Bossy talked the cashier into $7.00 instead of $10.00. 

The Prima Donna’s new gym shorts for school cost $1.40. I also snagged a pair of jeans for Dog-Walker and a blue sweater dress for Princess. Two little pairs of stretch pants for Baby Doll and a necklace later we walked out the door for about $35.00. It was a good shopping day.