Garage Sales!

So something I discovered when I moved to Staten Island is that they're not really into garage sales here. The selection is paltry, they're often only on Saturdays, and the sales themselves are terribly puny. Back home, you just pick a random weekend and cruise around the right neighborhoods and you can't help hitting half a dozen decent sales. Here, I discovered I had to do my homework, research before I hit the road. Unfortunately, because I work Saturdays, my options have been extremely limited. Since the museum is closed this week, I've been able to switch to a regular person schedule, allowing me a window of two weekends in which to hit all the sales necessary to compose Penny's wardrobe for the next year or two and fill the gaps in my collection for the Passenger. 

I take my garage sale hopping seriously, so I spent the past week

Egret consuming fish it captured

1. inventorying the baby wardrobe to know exactly what I need and what I don't
2. going through the Craigslist listings for the weekend to filter which sales mentioned baby furniture and clothes significantly enough to be worth visiting
3. mapping where each sale was to choose the routes that would likely give the highest payoff with the most stops in a small area
4. pestering my organization to get the petty cash they owe me so I had some shopping money
   

With my map, sale descriptions and Penny in tow, I headed off bright and early Saturday morning. By lunch, we had hit about 5 sales, procuring the better part of her 3T and 4T wardrobe, a toy at each sale (she's too cute for my wallet's good), and a baby picnic table. We enjoyed a leisurely lunch for an hour before heading out again. The last three sales were ok, but not as good as the morning's haul. I had a lot to do Sunday, so figured we'd miss the few Sunday sales I had moved down on the priority list. As Penny and I headed to church on Sunday, though, the mother-lode! There is this lady on that route who has the most amazing yard sales - tables and tables of baby clothes. She must actually go out and round up clothes to sell, unless she has an obscene number of children or a hoarding disorder. In any case, I did some speed shopping - hadn't found any PJs in any other sale, so ransacked her two loaded tables of boys and girls PJs in about 10 minutes before heading over to church. After church, we managed to head back and fill in a couple more holes in the wardrobe with her awesome selection of slightly used or even tags-on deeply discounted clothes. It was great!

After a full weekend of non-stop shopping, though, I figured I owed Penny a bit of actual Mommy and Penny fun. I asked what she wanted to do - she wanted to go on a slide by a lake. Conveniently enough, we were close to Willowbrook Park, complete with duck-filled lake and a nice playset. We stopped to feed some goldfish to the bluegill in the lake, but the ducks were a bit faster than the fish. It seemed the egret was a bit faster than the fish, too, because we saw him successfully stab and eat a fish. After some quality time on the slide, it was getting close to dinner time so we headed back to the car. On the way, we just couldn't resist the carousel. Penny selected "the beautiful horse" and eagerly boarded. It was a bit tough to record her excitement while I held her on and secured our bags, but she was having too good a time to miss the photo opp. She's so much fun to play with. Everything is so exciting, whenever you ask how she's doing, she responds, "Great!" Though she's not an angel by any means, she has a generally good spirit about excitement about exploring the world that's infectious. So we had an awesome weekend, I'm feeling good about how much we accomplished in just a couple of days. Looking forward to maybe spending this Saturday actually relaxing or spending time doing fun things. I do have a Flat Stanley visiting, so I have to find something exciting for him to do.