Saturday, December 11, 2004

ECD’s birthday is Monday and I took her daughter shopping for a gift today. We also managed to find a Christmas gift for her from Nee.

Nee had musical practice this morning, so ECD took her. I ran a couple errands and then I picked up Nee when practice was over. We took a large ziplock bag full of coins to the change machine where Nee raked in $25.01. Add the $5 bill in her pocket and she was a rich little girl ready to spend her money on her mother.

We went to Panera for a quick lunch and then hit two stores where we managed to find the perfect birthday and Christmas gifts. Nee had enough money left over to buy herself a fuzzy blue little purse thingy.

Nee’s an easy kid to be with, but it was still a tiring experience for me since I’m not used to entertaining an 8 year old for several hours. Add the Christmas traffic at the mall, which was worse than a normal rush hour commute, and the unbelievable crowds of people strolling the mall, and I came home ready for a nap. I was reminded today why I do my Christmas shopping almost exclusively online anymore. That’s pure craziness and takes every bit of joy out of the purpose of the shopping for me. That said, God provided an extraordinary amount of grace to me today - I had patience in abundance with it all. That’s definitely not normal and had to be supernaturally gifted to me today.

My plan was to drop Nee at home and then head back out to the grocery store. But we got home and I crashed - I’m done for today. And we have a full day tomorrow as well, with the children’s musical at church and then my parents and I are taking ECD and Nee for a special lunch for ECD’s birthday. At some point I need to make 6 dozen cookies for a cookie exchange I got roped into in the neighborhood this Wednesday**.

**I say I got roped into it. Truth is I could have rejected the invitation, but I didn’t want to start out my tenure in the neighborhood as the anti-social one. Of course, I am the anti-social one, but I don’t want them to know that.