Patches is a boy with distinct tastes. One of his favorite flavors is butter. Breakfast is not complete without buttering his french toast at least twice. In fact Patches has been known to finish off a soft butter if it is left unguarded on the counter.
Today was a new venture into butter flavorings. I came into the kitchen to find Patches industriously adding butter to his ramen noodle soup.
My kids are acquiring real garage sale acumen. Patches and Gleek went along for this morning’s trip. They happily played with toys at every sale and only made minor protests at leaving things behind. One of the reasons that Gleek was so willing to leave things is that she acquired a 2 foot tall American Girls horse at the first sale for only $1. The horse’s hair was a mess, so she spent all the travel time brushing out snarls. Patches did not purchase anything today, but he got a yo-yo for free merely by being so cute while asking the price. He also acquired a used cell phone out of a “free” box. Now I need to figure out whether the phone is safe for him to play with, or whether I need to make it quietly disappear.
So the morning wasn’t really the complete bust it felt when I arrived home.
One of the sales was truly amazing. I’m guessing that this person treats summer garage sales as a business, because the amount of stuff he had was amazing. He had 500 or more videos, 10-12 glass topped tables, 4 lawn mowers, 3 jumping horses, 40 soccer balls, two baskets full of baseballs, an array of tools, and loads of other stuff. Unfortunately the prices weren’t low enough for me. He has a prime location and prices accordingly. $5 is a good price for a brand new soccer ball, but not good enough for me to buy one that we don’t really need.
I stopped at 7 garage sales this morning. At the first sale (given by a neighbor) I acquired two pairs of tap shoes for free and a good pair of boots for Patches for $.25. At the remaining 7 sales I got nothing. This is normal and wouldn’t have been frustrating except at the next to last sale there was a beautiful set of bunkbeds. They were $50 and they’d already sold. Having missed out on a set of $50 bunkbeds soured the whole expedition. But that particular sale did not advertise in the paper, I just happened to drive by it and stop. If I’d seen an advertisement for bunkbeds, I would have gone there first.
So now I’m hot, hungry, grumpy and have little to show for 90 minutes, 8 bucklings of children, and however many miles of driving. Grr.