Downtown

Downtown. My Aunt and Uncle are in town this week and have been staying downtown. Every year, my Uncle has a conference here and my Aunt loves all of the shopping time available to her in between company lunches and dinners. And my parents drove up early in the week so that my Mom could get in on some of that valuable shopping time that my Aunt so deeply adores. My Dad, well he is just a very flexible husband who finds things to do while my Mom is frantically shopping with my Aunt.

My parents were coming for the weekend anyways for my son's birthday week, so they decided to stay downtown for a few nights leading up to the weekend. On Thursday, they called early in the morning asking if the kids could spend the night at their hotel that night. Of course my kids wanted to do that as they adore their Nona and HP and know that staying downtown with their Grandparents means a lot of hot chocolate and a lot of kiddy cartoons. They were running around the house shrieking with excitement. It was very cute.

While my son was at preschool that morning, my daughter and I met my new 'preschool mom' friend for coffee. She is a photographer (as I've previously mentioned) and a wakeboarder and snowboarder and was a college volleyball player so conversation was endless. How lucky I am to have met her. A friend who is already becoming a very good friend.

After preschool, we drove downtown and met up with my parents and my Aunt. We had lunch and then the shopping resumed. My Dad offered to take the kids back to the hotel for ice cream sundaes and cartoons so that I could shop with my Mom and my Aunt. They are extreme shoppers and I almost considered joining the kids for ice cream but, I decided to stick with the ladies. I had one place that I wanted to go and my Aunt showed some interest in going there as well. After staying in the spice store for like a century, we made our way up to my store. A really cool and hip second hand store full of endless possibilities.

Sure enough, after seeing me enter the dressing room with fifteen pairs of jeans, my Mom and Aunt decided to move along to the next place. Fine with me I said, this gave me the chance to look at every single item in the store with complete independence all on my own. That kind of time to myself is a rarity. So I think I stayed for about an hour and half. And I did come out with a 'new to me' pair of jeans. Skinny jeans no less. I would have bet a million dollars last year at this time that I would never buy a pair of skinny jeans. But now that I have my boots, it's nice to wear a pair of jeans that tuck inside.

Anyways, I could go on and on about this day but I will leave it with one classic story. I had my Mom's cell phone with me since I gave my Dad mine and my Aunt had hers. After leaving the consignment store, I walked across the street to a popular coffee shop. Once inside, I realized that it was packed full of quiet readers and lap top users. As I was weaving through looking for a place to sit, the fire alarm started going off. We all looked around and then I realized everyone was looking at me. The sound was coming from me. MY MOM'S PHONE! I scrambled around for my Mom's phone trying to push the 'end call' button. Come to find out, my Dad had secretly set my Mom's ring tone to 'fire alarm' when her sister calls. Seriously!!! And of course the timing of this phone ring came at the most perfect of times.