Saturday Shopping

As mentioned, we are not big "Black Friday" shoppers and prefer to do almost everything online, but found a trip to Sioux City to be necessary to do a few returns and pick up some things at Lowe's. We dropped off Ryan at Adam's parents (always a key to a successful and efficient shopping trip) and headed to Sioux City, via Walmart in Sioux Center. He got almost everything on our list completed in record time, and here are a few highlights:

1. Divide and conquer is the name of the game at Walmart with each of us taking half the list. We got a bunch of things knocked off our list before we even left Sioux Center.
2. Lowe's, for the first time in my memory, actually had their store properly staffed on a Saturday morning! Usually, it's hard to scare up anyone, let along someone who can help you in the right department, but we had really good luck and got the paint we needed plus a few other supplies. We did "fall "for a Black Friday special, but thought a portable fire pit for $39 was too good of a deal to pass up, so Merry Christmas to us, I guess!
3. You know how long it takes me to find a pair of black shoes for work? Years. You know how long it took Adam to find some? Less the time it took for me to complete a return at the Kohl's customer service desk. Oh, to be a man! I also used some super-savvy/pregnancy craving justified logic to convince him to add a box of Ghirardelli chocolate squares to our order because with the 15% coupon I'd brought along, his shoes dropped below the magic price of $50 that earns you $15 in Kohl's cash. Adding the chocolate got us just above the minimum. I call that free chocolate (and the chance to order $15 worth of stuff next week). For the record, we also saw no less than 8 families from OC, all with NWC connections, at Kohl's. So much for Small Business Saturday!
4. I thought I needed to pick up an online order at Sears since the "confirmation" email they sent me said 2 of my items were available for pickup at the store instead of shipping to my house, like I'd selected. It turns out it was just a glitch in their system, but waiting in the merchandise pick-up area did provide some comic relief. A lady brought in her vacuum to be sent off for repair because it "was working great, but suddenly stopping sucking".  The worker was checking for the model number and when he turned over the canister, several coins started clanking. He emptied them and handed them to the lady, saying, "Oh! There were a bunch of coins in there!"  She replied, "Oh yes, it works great for picking those up!"  Um...I'm no certified technician, but I think that might be part of your problem, here, lady!!
5. Our last stop was Hobby Lobby where I warned Adam "This is not a hunting and gathering trip...there will be some browsing involved," but he was fine with that. While looking through the home decor, noticed they had a line of vinyl lettering. I've had a few items from Uppercase Living over the years and always had good luck, so we picked out a good, large saying that would look great at the bottom of our stairs, before you go into the toy room.  At only $35 (plus the 40% off one item coupon you can always get at retailmenot.com), it was much more economical than Uppercase Living, but we found out later: You get what you pay for.

We headed back and enjoyed supper with Adam's parents since we hadn't been able to spend Thanksgiving with them.  We were happy to have gotten a lot done and it was nice to actually spend a few hours together. Our discussion on the way to Sioux City even resulted in us finally deciding on baby names, including a complete switch in our top "boy" first name and finally agreeing on a girls' name. Amazing what happens when we actually have some uninterrupted time to talk!