One woman in a house of Pestill men

It’s funny the difference between garage sailing as a non-parent and as a parent.

Before we had kids Dave and I used to go to garage sales once in a while. 

As a non-parent, this was the routine:

Wake up around 10 or eleven on the weekend.
Go to Tim’s and get a coffee.
Peruse the streets, looking for garage sale signs.  If we find one, great.  If not… hey, we can always go home and have a nap!
Once we saw a garage sale, we’d stop the car, get out and take a leisurely stroll through the junk, looking for anything that might be “fun” to try out, or movies/books we hadn’t seen before, that kind of stuff.
Leave the sale, go home and have a nap.

As a parent, this is the routine:
Keep a running log and write on the calendar when all the good town-wide garage sales are coming up.  By good, we mean when the rich people unload their junk.
Actually WANT the kids to get up early so we can get to the sales before all the good stuff is gone.
Jump up out of bed around 6:30-7:00 as soon as we hear the kids stirring.
Collect the following: juice boxes, cereal in baggies, wet wipes, an extra pair of kids’ underwear, tape measure, list of measurements around the house.
Make sure everyone has peed.
Stop at Tim’s and grab coffees plus a plethora of donuts to keep mouths full.
Go to the garage sale town and immediately look for a toy we can buy the boys to keep them quiet while we search.
Drive around quickly and peer out the window to see if it’s good stuff.  If everything is pink or there are a lot of baby paraphernelia, keep on going.
Once we see a good one, park and then decide if it’s worth it for the boys to get out of the van and look as well.
If the boys do look, listen to “can we get this pez dispenser?”  or “I HAVE to have this remote control car that’s missing the antenna and the remote!”
Do this a few hundred times, while stopping intermittently for pee, juice and snack breaks.
Get back into the van for the final time, exhausted and realizing that all our purchases are either toys or kids’ clothes.
On the drive home realize that all the purhcases we made for the boys are now defunct because they have already lost interest in them.
Go home and wish we could have a nap.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 10:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.