Black Friday craziness ...

So Paul and I are crazy. You didn't need my blog post to tell you that one, I bet. :) We never intend to do any Black Friday shopping, yet a few times we have. This was one of those crazy years. Paul saw a fake Christmas tree -- with lights -- for only $20, and he has been wanting one of those for a long time. (Mind you, he wanted the kind with white lights, but after a quick poll of the kids he realized we HAD to get colored lights!)

We found several other things at ShopKo on sale, so we decided to go for it. Walmart also had jammies for only $3 per pair, and we stocked up on last year's and loved that price! (Although they shrunk, the kids had four pairs of jammies instead of only one.) Kmart had Legos buy two get three free. So, where to start?

We're not crazy crazy, just slightly crazy. We are not about to wait outside in the freezing cold to get into a store. ShopKo opened at 5 a.m., so we woke up at 5 a.m., got dressed and headed out. We got there at 5:15 and headed to get our items. Amazingly, everything we wanted was easily still there! (One thing we semi-wanted was gone, but hey, that just saved us $12. :) We had to wait in line for 30 minutes, but other than that it was a great morning of shopping. I forgot to mention that getting there at 5:15 meant some people were already leaving, so I got the parking spot closest to the door that wasn't handicapped! That's saying something since the parking lot was full and some people were parked on the street. Ouch!

So then we headed to Walmart exclusively for the jammies. We got in and found only one pair left for boys. Dang-o! They had some others, but we weren't sure of their price (one lady said $10). We were going to get them anyway since they came with a flashlight, slippers and a pouch thing. We had checked ShopKo's prices on jammies and found that even at 55 percent off they were $13. And we HAVE to get jammies for Christmas Eve -- it's tradition! :) In any case, the second we walked in the door Paul got in line, and I went to looking for the jammies. I found one pair for Shayla in the wrong place, so I grabbed those.

Then I had a stroke of brilliance: Go look near the cash registers where people put stuff they don't want while they're waiting in line. Doing this gave me another pair for Shayla and three pairs for Tyler. Score! Since the line was moving slowly, I decided to make another sweep to see what I could find, and I found three more pairs for Zachary. I was so happy! The only downer was that I got a Ben 10 pair for Zachary, and I know Tyler would LOVE those. But beggars can't be choosers, right? Paul was next in line, but I decided to make one more sweep in hopes I could get a little miracle.

Turns out I found an abandoned shopping cart that had Tyler's size of Ben 10 jammies. Seriously?!? I was so happy! Paul had already checked out, but an employee said we could switch the Spiderman ones for the others. And some lucky person will now get to find the size 10 Spiderman jammies (probably the last size 10 in the store at this point!). So, for $9 we got each of the "little" ones three pairs of flannel jammies. Sweet!

Kmart's legos were very picked over when we got there (an hour after they opened), so we decided to ditch that attempt. But overall we had a very happy Black Friday. (I liked it even more since I had Paul with me this year -- last year I went alone, and that just wasn't nearly as productive or fun. :) What a good hubby to wake up so early so we can get games and jammies for our kiddos! (I'll pretend that it wasn't driven by his desire for a new Christmas tree ... :)