Good-bye to Summer

Okay, so I had all of these grandiose ideas about what summer would be for our family. How I was going to run things. What things we would accomplish. Wait.....Where did it go?

As school starts in a week and a couple days, I'm sad to see it come, but at the same time, I'm excited to see what this coming year will bring in growth for the kids. We got our school shopping done last week. I feel like we did pretty well.

I'm realizing, as an adult, what a strange child I was. When my mom took me school shopping, I always settled for what was cheapest. I never asked her to buy me the "in" thing although I would have loved to have worn what everyone else had. For my kids, I don't let them get away with settling. I don't buy them the best there is, but I make sure they get something they will LOVE to wear the first day of school.

I took the kids one or two at a time over to Old Navy. Aedan's trip was a BLAST! He liked everything. He must have taken twenty items into the dressing room.

Gannon was with us and played dressing room assistant. He took the clothes we didn't want out of the dressing room to give to the attendant. Aedan tried on everything knowing he would get two pairs of pants and a shirt (we had inventoried everything and found that he didn't need much--he actually didn't need anything, but like I said, I want them to be happy to wear what they wear that first day).

He found a camouflage pair of pants and a camouflage shirt. He was in love with these. He tried on everything else, but always came back to these until the very last shirt--dark blue with a skull and cross-bones on it. This won out over the camo. Ahhh. Gannon and I had both been trying everything we could to talk him out of that shirt.

There had been a few others that looked so good on him, so I tucked them into the "maybe"pile. As soon as the camouflage shirt was placed in the no pile and the blue shirt into the yes, I grabbed the camo pants, the skull shirt and two other shirts and a pair of jeans and started to head out of the dressing room. Aedan noticed that I had grabbed the extra shirts and said, "Mom, are we getting those too?"

I replied with, "Yes, just because I love you."

Aedan's response was classic, "Yeh because you love me more than Gannon, huh?"

Suddenly we heard Gannon, who'd been doing his dressing room duties, on the other side of the door, "Uh, Aedan, I'm right here."

That night, after Zan got home, the kids did a fashion show for him to show off their new duds. I narrated as a fashion show announcer. They all seemed really happy.