Too much extra time

Is it time to pull out the fall clothes since school is starting? Around here it's still hovering around 100 degrees so I'm tempted to say a big NO except for the painful awareness that my girls are outgrowing their summer clothes. Since you've heard all about the hand-me-downs around here, you might infer that I take full advantage of our wealth of clothes and rarely buy the kids clothes at all. And if you did infer that, you'd be right. I'm pretty sure that's not the proper way to use the word infer but you know what I'm talking about. I know how lucky I am that aside from the occasional tutu or shoes, our clothing budget is spent solely on me and Sean.

Oh who are we kidding. It's spent on me.

Except when one of the kids actually needs something specific. And about once a year when Sean needs either more work shirts or socks. While we're on the topic of his clothes, I'll update you on our dry cleaners incident. I think I forgot to do that!

Sean hardly ever has dry cleaning. I'm lucky I know. He has a uniform for work and the shirts they have to wear are designed to be tough/stand up to a ton of wear so besides the occasional church outfit I never take anything of his to the cleaners. Since I'm a girl, inevitably I end up with more "dry clean only" dresses than I'd like and the dress involved in the stand-off was one of the picky little tagged ones.

The day after the police came to help us, (two weeks ago I think,) the kid texted me to set up a time to try again. After back and forth texts--really weird to do with a business--Sean went to pick up my dress and get the full story. Maybe I should say, "try to get the full story." The kid really is just a kid-17 years old and the son of the former owner of the business. Since his father was too much of a weasel to meet his customers himself he made his son do it day after day during his summer break from school. Without going into how many different kinds of wrong that is I'll just say two things: I'm glad I got the dress back and I'm glad my husband would never run away from something like that if he'd been the business owner. I'm thankful for his character.

Okay back to the topic I started on: kid clothes. Specifically Charlie's clothes since Joy is wearing everything that used to be Charlie's. I get the in-between or specific things from various stores, always on sale. Resale stores are great too. Miss Charlie isn't exactly a wall flower and if I spent lots of money on her clothes I'd always be frustrated with how not-so-gentle she is while playing. Soooooo today when I had way too much free time, (all three kids went down at 12:30 and the first one woke up at 3:30!! Praise Jesus!!) I looked online for fun.

If I had unlimited funds to blow on totally unrealistic/impractical things for Charlie, I'd get her this. Or this. Or at least this.

Now that was fun. Pretend online shopping never looked so good!