Next week. The last full week of summer. AHHH!  Autumn is rolling in like a raging storm and I will soon have a second grader.

Today, I made a point to take the boys out to some garage sales. We’ve had a stressful week, and they’ve been asking me to take them to a few. We literally have only gone out a couple times this summer to garage sales, and that’s strange for me–Garage Sale Queen over here.  Apparently, I did not take my role seriously this summer.  I blocked off the morning in the calendar and promised to take them. Last night I did some studying and plotted a route for about ten sales. It’s so hard to find ones these days that will include things they are interested in. When they were both little, everyone and their brother sold stuff that they fancied. It’s easy to please a two year old. But now, they are very specific in what they like, and it’s so hard to find garage sales that sell boy toys that appeal to the over four, under ten crowd.  But I managed to find a few.

We stopped at the bank to grab some cash. And then I plugged in our first address-it was a bit of a hike. Twenty three minutes later we pulled onto the street to nothing. No sale. No house number that matched the garage sale address. I frantically looked for my list of addresses only to realize that I must have dropped it when I got out to run to the ATM.  My whole vision of the morning sank right there, on the side of the road. I was going to disappoint these boys after talking up all week that we were going to spend the morning garage saleing. I scanned my brain for anything. . . some memory of some of the addresses. Thankfully, I could remember the first three off the list, and that was going to have to be enough. It turned out though, that I had put the wrong town into my phone, and we had driven over twenty minutes to the wrong street–plugging the right address into my phone showed me that we were, in fact, another twenty minutes away from the correct street. Oh my head.  Of course, as luck would have it, we got stuck behind a truck painting lines on the street. It took us about eight minutes to go 0.8 miles before we were able to ditch him. After the rough start, I was sure that the morning was going to go to poop.

To my utter delight, I was quite wrong. The first location that I had starred because I knew we needed to head there first turned up a few treasures that we purchased. Some small brand new lego sets and a brand new $50 Harry Potter Lego set that we scored for $15.  That’s higher than normal garage sale spending for me, but it was too good a deal to turn down for my lego lover seven year old. I remembered two other addresses from off my list and amazingly enough, we found a few other treasures that the boys were so thrilled with. A Nintendo DS Lite and four games that are perfect for their interests–lego batman, lego indiana jones, ninjagos and angry birds. Mind you, the DS is old. AND it’s pink with a little paw print on it. . . but they literally could care less. It was cheap and it works, and we are thrilled. Our rough start didn’t damper the day one bit. Phew!

And it turned out, the little list of my addresses had fallen WAY down below the side of the seat.  I guess I didn’t drop it after all. And I guess we didn’t need it after all 🙂