The Mad Dash

I spent Saturday and Sunday shopping. And part of today as well.

Shopping.

Me. And two children.

I know that some people love to shop. It's not really my thing, especially when having to drag the urchins along. Saturday was actually quite nice though. We had had a pretty awful Friday afternoon, so I was glad Saturday ended up being a good day.

I took the children to "the nice mall" about 45 minutes away from our house. We got there relatively early, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it wasn't crowded at all. We went to a few stores, and the children each got to make a bear at Build-A-Bear. Build-A-Bear took a lot longer than expected, so the mall had started getting crowded by then. Sass had wanted to eat in the food court. (Why is it that the mall food court is so appealing to children?) Spyder and I decided that the food court wasn't such a great idea though, since we found exactly one unoccupied table, and I wasn't about to let him sit there by himself to save us the seat.

We decided to leave the mall, and we ended up at Backyard Burger near my bookstore. Since we were so close to the bookstore, of course we had to stop in. I bought a Christmas gift, rounding out the gifts I need to ship. It's nice to be done with one set of gifts.

After the bookstore, I remembered that we were supposed to be in the town-next-door's Christmas parade. We dashed home to change clothes, then off to the parade. By the time that was over, it was almost 10 pm, and we had been gone from home (with a minor pit stop for clothing changes) for nearly 12 hours.

I think we all almost fell into our beds that night.

Sunday morning, my mom called and said she was coming to my town to shop. I called The Michael to join in. So the shopping continued.

We started with an early lunch at Fazoli's, to avoid the after-church crowd. As The Michael says, "Those Christians are serious about their Sunday food." Skeeter even joined us, although he was interrupted with phone calls a couple of times and he had to dash back to work after lunch.

Mom, The Michael, the children, and I went to 9 different stores. We were so intent on the shopping thing that I completely forgot it was Sunday. Skeeter called about 15 minutes before Awana started and asked if we were at the church yet. YIKES! I ran to the checkout, and I got them to the church just as the opening prayer was starting. I had to go apologize to their teachers, since neither of them had a book, Bible, or uniform. Again, we were gone all day, and we all were exhausted by the time we got home.

Today was a relatively easy day, although we did have to go to a few places. I'm looking for a new perfume, so we went to sniff fragrances at Dillard's. The children love that though, so they were perfectly happy to do that. They also managed to talk me into lunch at Chick-Fil-A. I got them back though. I made them go to Kroger afterward. HA! :)

Spyder has begged for a complete at home day tomorrow, and I'm going to try to comply.