Shopping, Swimming, and Painting

This girl is a study in contrasts. Here she is standing on a rock at La Cantera Mall. For some reason, she got on top of that rock and asked me to take a picture of her. She has her sparkly pink purse with her money in it, because she was planning on buying something with her own money. She has what I call her "sporty" clothes on--a T-shirt and "dazzle" pull-on shorts. The temperatures got up into the 80s today, but it was pretty windy. That's why she's wearing a jacket.

Yesterday she was wearing a regular pair of shorts with a zipper and button. When she was getting ready for swim practice, she had her swimsuit on under her clothes and her shorts were unbuttoned under her shirt (the same shirt and shorts she had worn all day at school). She said that her shorts were too tight and she asked if she could wear her shorts unbuttoned. Of course I said, "Absolutely not!" I told her to put on a pair of shorts that fit. She then whined about how she didn't didn't have any shorts that fit her anymore. I answered her in the same way as I answer her big brothers when they tell me that something doesn't fit. "Why didn't you tell me so I could have bought you something else?" Her answer was to ask if we could go shopping for new shorts today. Luckily, I had the day off so I could spend time with my kids--so I spent time with the little ones at the mall.

The last store we bought her clothes in (around the beginning of school) was The Children's Place, so we headed there first. On the way, she asked if we could go into Justice For Girls. I was surprised because we've looked there a couple of times, but she's never liked anything in there before. Well today, she liked a bunch of stuff that we saw right after we walked in. She picked out about five shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of cropped pants, and a cropped cardigan (with sequins). She tried on another couple of shirts but she pretty much liked everything she picked out. After she tried everything on, I asked her if she wanted to look around a little more. She said that she had gotten enough already. We had only seen maybe one fourth of the store and she was done shopping! She is much more decisive than her Mama, that's for sure!

The caveat to that is that while I was waiting to check out, she saw some fancy erasers that she wanted to buy with her own money. She is obsessed with fancy erasers! She wanted to buy a couple of packages but I held her to only one. After all, how could she have so much that she needs to erase? I did convince her to go into the Gap to buy shorts and another pair of cropped pants because they were having a great sale. Everything we bought today was 30-40% off but the total still came out to around $170. Ouch!

It was warm enough that we took a trip to our neighborhood pool this afternoon. When we got in the pool, however, we realized that the water was still cold! That didn't stop the little man from splashing around. He stayed near the pool steps, walking and splashing back and forth, just like last year. Alex actually got out of the house to come with us. He was the only one that went into the pool completely. Even Alex, who says that he never gets cold, was cold, so we didn't stay more than about 30-45 minutes. Natalie had gone to the pool with a neighborhood friend, and they didn't stay long either because of the cold water. It'll be fun for her if the water is still cold when the neighborhood swim team starts practicing in a couple of weeks.

As a side note for my Mom. She got him a Thomas the Tank Engine swimsuit last year (3T) and this year she got him a different Thomas swimsuit (4T). Although the 3T one still fits and fits pretty well, he insisted on wearing the new one. It looks gigantic on him. The new one at least didn't seem like it was going to fall off, but it does accentuate his scrawny little legs.

Where was Patrick during all of this fun? He was painting Anthony's room. Anthony's stuff is strewn through the house. This is a picture of his bed and dresser drawers in the formal dining room--that still has the Lego Advent Calendar stuff from Christmas in it. Just painting the trim took Patrick most of the day. He drove Anthony to his friend's house around 1pm today and that's where Anthony is right now. We'll pick him up tomorrow morning and I'm sure we'll be enlisting his help with the rest of the painting.

One more note about today--we just found out that someone has been racking up thousands of dollars in charges on our Discover card. We only found out because today I was denied twice when I tried to use my Discover card. I called about it and they told me about some mysterious charges, most of which was for "office supplies". I'm sad about the fraud, of course, but I'm also sad because I've had this same account number since 1990--my very first credit card. They said that they'll take all of the disputed charges off our bill, so hopefully all of that will work out for us.