Back to School shopping

Last week was a hectic week.  (aren't they all?)  E was sick last week. He was sent home on Wednesday from daycare with a fever. It came on really suddenly and lasted until the middle of the night. At it's highest point, it was 102.6, which wasn't that bad. Once the fever broke though, he was happy as a clam.


H was in her last week of camp at CA.  We took her and a neighbor to and from camp every day.  It was nice for H to spend some time with a friend, but I think she got extremely overstimulated.  Friday night, she wanted this friend to spend the night.  I reluctantly said yes and oh, how I wish I would have said no. 

H has a hard time falling asleep.  She always has.  It's MUCH worse on sleep over nights.  Friday night at 11:30, she comes to my bed crying b/c she can't go to sleep.  The other girl, of course, is out cold.  The girls wanted to sleep in the bonus room upstairs.  The other girl was hogging much of the futon so H and I spread our her sleeping bag on the floor and I laid with her until she went to sleep.  Of course, they were up before 7:00 and H had not gotten enough sleep.  We muddled through breakfast.  I made the girls watch a movie while I cooked and then, we packed the other girl up and sent her home.  H was a basket case...  crying and throwing tantrum after tantrum when I asked her to clean up the mess that she and the other girl made.  Finally, I made her lay in her bed and refused to allow her to read or play.  She was out within thirty minutes and slept for 3 hours.  Now, H hasn't taken a nap since she was about 3.  So, this is a major thing.  When she woke up, she was such an angel.  She was using manners, she was smiling and happy.  A complete 180.  From that point on, the weekend was MUCH better.

H has received her list of school supplies from her teacher. There aren't that many things on it. However, this weekend was the weekend to get them since we are headed to the beach next weekend. When we were children, purchasing school supplies was one of the most exciting times of the school year. Our parents, pretty much let us pick anything we wanted to to help us get ready for going back to school. My sister and I would pick out the coolest new pens and pencils, binders, folders, glue, markers, highlighters, etc. It was always a lot of fun and I want to pass that tradition on to my children.  (I think my parents felt like this would get us excited to go back to school, and they were right.)  D, of course, wanted her to get the $.99 red/blue/yellow binders at Target.  No thanks!!  So, after H's nap on Saturday, we were off to Office Depot.  She came home with quite a large loot!!  She has four 3 ring decorative binders, she has two neon spiral notebooks (colors were her choosing), a pencil sharpener, a cool new pencil case for her notebook, a set of awesome highlighters, a huge set of new colored pencils and a 4GB flash drive with a plaid blue design on it.  Yes, a flash drive!  How crazy is it that I'm buying a 8 year old a flash drive for school!!



Our neighbors across the street have a baby boy who just turned 1 in July.  They threw a birthday party for him Saturday evening.  It was a lot of fun.  There were a lot of children there and they all played really well together.  They served salad and pizza and cupcakes.

Sunday was our day to go back to school clothes shopping.  Oh, how I loath this.  I had planned to take Friday off and head to the outlets and do the back to school shopping myself.  However, during one of H's fits on Saturday morning, she was complaining about how she hated one of the outfits I was asking her to hang up in her closet.  I've been wanting her to become more involved in dressing herself, so I felt like this was prime time to get her involved.  So, off we went on Sunday afternoon.  She was bound and determined to get some 'flashy' clothes.  (meaning bright colors with sequins or sparkles)  Yay! - NOT!!  So, the first place we went was Justice.  Can I just tell you, I absolutely HATE this store.  The clothes are crap.  They are WAY over priced and they just don't reflect the kind of look I would like her to have.  Regardless, we spend well over an hour in this store. We had one really LONG disagreement over why this was not appropriate clothing attire for school:

 We tried on several outfits and finally decide on a few things.  My favorite was this one:

It's flashy (sequins), but subdued.  So, I was ok with it.  We also purchased a ruffle denim skirt, two tanks like this:

Yes, those are the colors... neon pink and yellow, but they are flashy (sequins).  We also got her 6 pairs of panties.  The sign said buy 4, get 2 free.  All that rang up to $171...  Seriously.  For two outfits and panties, that's just too much.  Plus the fact is, the sequins will probably fall off after a washing or two.

So, off we went.  We headed to Gap Kids next.  There, we found the cutest tops. 

(except in purple)

These tops were buy 2, get them for $12.50 each.  In lieu of the cami we just purchased at Justice for $24!!  So, we had to have some discussions about how you can purchase items for reasonable prices and then make them 'flashy' with accessories.  She actually 'got it' and continued to work well with me for the rest of the shopping trip.

We we to Belk (after a snack from the Cookie Company ;) ) and we actually ran into one of her girl friends and her family shopping for back to school clothes too!  This was great b/c they, too, were being cost conscious and H and her friend were able to pick out some items together!!  Many of these items came with accessories... a belt or necklace, etc.

We ended up taking back the undies and the denim skirt to Justice and getting $76 back.  But, we purchased some denim shorts on sale at Gymboree for her to wear her neon tanks with.  At GapKids, we purchased the two shirts above along with a pair of white denim shorts.  At Belk, we got two shirts (that are her FAVORITE even though they aren't flashy at all) and two pairs of shorts.  After all that shopping and talking about accessorizing, we went by Claire's as well and purchased some 'flashy' headbands and three packets of earrings - some dangly.  We also bought a pair of Nike tennis shoes and a pair of Tom's.  So, we are set for her to start back to school.  (we will probably have to do all this again in about a month when the weather starts to cool and she can no longer wear shorts to school)

Until then...