The New Goodwill Is Here! The New Goodwill Is Here! Things Are Going to Start Happening to Me Now!

We got a Goodwill! We got a Goodwill! I'm so happy! We got a Goodwill!

Back when Rob was a non-cuddly little infant in a stroller and I was a stunned and isolated new mother, we had a Goodwill within easy walking distance of our apartment. I used to have a goal of getting the two of us out of the house every single day, and that was one of my favorite destinations. Pretty plate for 50 cents! Revereware saucepan for $1.99! End table for $10.00! Suitcase for $5.00!

Plus, that was where we donated our decluttering: I didn't feel as dumb getting rid of all the brand-new tags-still-on-them placemats it turned out we never used if I knew they were going to a good cause (and to another shopper who would get the same thrill I got when I saw the plates for 50 cents).

Then we moved, and there was a Goodwill but it was pretty far away, and then that Goodwill closed. Years of twilight passed.

Then, on a day we didn't realize we should note as The Day Our Lives Changed, construction started on a new building. We felt mild curiosity: What will it be? A new Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts, probably, since there are only two so far in that mile-long strip.

But no! No! It was a GOODWILL. We discussed it. Could it be a rumor? Maybe it is just a Dunkin Donuts BUILT BY Goodwill, and not an actual Goodwill STORE. But it continued to look like it was actually going to be a Goodwill.

This past Wednesday, my mom and I were driving up that road and we saw the full parking lot. Could it be OPEN? Is it OPEN?? IT'S OPEN. My mom made a hard right into the parking lot. And oh! The riches! A Gap sweater and a J. Crew sweater for William, $4.99 each---but one of them was yellow-tagged, so it was only $2.50.

William does not want to model his $2.50 Gap sweater

Four non-cropped sweaters for Elizabeth, who had NO sweaters this year because they're ALL cropped, $1.99 each---oh, but one is yellow-tagged, so only $1.00!

Elizabeth in her $1.00 non-cropped sweater

A Rugged Bear pinwale corduroy dress for Elizabeth, $1.99---whoops, yellow tag, $1.00! A cute short-sleeved t-shirt cardigan for me, $36.00 store tag still on it, $7.99! A Lands' End tie-dye shirt for Edward---THE VERY ONE I HAVE CONSIDERED BUYING FROM LANDS' END.

IT'S THE VERY ONE

Carter's spring/fall jacket for Henry, $1.99! A Gymboree sweater for Henry, looks like it's never even been laundered let alone worn, $1.99!

Henry wearing $1.99

Whoooo. I felt faint. I think one reason I got so many good deals is that four of the five kids wear sweaters, but sweaters are the kind of thing a lot of people WON'T wear. So people end up donating huge piles of them: I think in the men's section there were a lot of Unwanted Sweaters Received For Christmas (which William will wear EVERY SINGLE DAY until spring).

Speaking of sweaters, I wished SO HARD I was involved in a group that did an Ugly Christmas Sweater event, because there was a PERFECT sweater for it. Perfect in that it was not actually entirely ugly, but was nevertheless comical. Cardinals and holly EVERYWHERE. Also: it was a VEST CARDIGAN.

Then, that same night Paul and I went out on a date (we went to Chipotle because neither of us had ever been; we both liked it a lot) (I wore my new short-sleeved cardigan), and after we went to dinner we went back to Goodwill! I bought another few things for the kids, and tried on a jacket that wasn't quite right the first time and wasn't quite right the second time either. I looked more thoroughly in the plates and stationery, where I found a Griffin & Sabine stationery set I would have wanted very very badly twenty years ago, and maybe I need to go back and buy it. [Edit: I went back and bought it!] Paul bought an electronic item BECAUSE HE DIDN'T KNOW WHAT IT WAS. It was $4.99, that's what it was. I could get TWO GAP SWEATERS for that. He also bought a set of three new glass storage containers, for a full-price price. I don't think Paul understands Goodwill.

VALENTINE'S DAY BIRD TOWEL SURPRISE

It all started with a link to these towels, decorated with two little aqua birdies and "Love! It is all u need!"

The next thing that happened was a big heavy box arriving yesterday from Rachel of Doing My Best (of Crappy Day Present fame):

Do you see the small pink writing on the top photo? "This is a surprise full of surprises." And then note the blue writing in the bottom photo: "There can never be too many!" Which was soon to feel MUCH MORE SIGNIFICANT.

I opened the box, and:

Re-enactment

Ha ha, she got me the bird towels! SEVERAL, it looks like! Ha ha! That Rachel!

We were in the middle of the "homework and clean-up and dinner prep melee" time of day, so I thought I'd better wait and unpack the rest later. But I sent a quick direct message to Rachel, saying the box had arrived safely and ha ha bird towels thanx!

I went back to the kitchen...and something caught my eye:

Wait

And then:
 

What's this?

And another, and another---a sticker on every bird towel. And SO MANY bird towels! A WHOLE DOZEN in all, coming from a WHOLE DOZEN different people! [It took me awhile to come up with a pleasing way to do the links there. Finally I picked towels blindly one by one out of the box and did them in that order, except for Anne and Joanne who are at the end because their towels were in the photos. There.]

So when I said above that "The next thing that happened was a big heavy box arriving"---NO, that was NOT the next thing. The ACTUAL next thing was Rachel organizing a SECRET SURPRISE.

OMG

INTERNET BIRD TOWEL VALENTINES.

And there was MORE:

ZOMG

A wrapped box from another internet friend, and a note that another internet friend had contributed toward shipping costs, and a note that others had wanted to participate but the number of towels was getting daunting; plus a pile of Crappy Day Presents from Rachel, plus Hershey bars with almonds. Does the size of the photo make those Hershey bars look like regular-sized bars? DO NOT BE FOOLED. They are the BIGGIES.

THANK YOU, everybody. This was a REALLY fun surprise---and I was COMPLETELY surprised! Happy Valentine's Day to YOU, too!


[Edit: Also see Rachel's post on how it came together on her end!]

Idea for Helping Children Memorize Their Name, Address, or Phone Number

My friend mentioned how she taught her kindergartner his phone number, and I thought it was a great idea: She made their phone number the password on her cell phone. To play one of the games he likes, he has to type in their phone number. (Her phone's password isn't to keep people out, it's just to keep her from pocket-dialing.)

I was thinking this could be used for other things, too, like teaching kids their home address, or how to spell their names. Our home computer has a password for each kid to keep them from accidentally or on purpose messing up each other's stuff. It's easy to re-set the passwords, so we could change them to be whatever we wanted the particular child to be memorizing: a phone number, a name, an address. (We could make Rob's "Mom and Dad know best"!)

Beach Dream

In my dream last night, going to the beach with friends:

Me: What a perfect day for it.
Friend: Yeah. Was it two years ago we came here last?
Me: I think so. Yeah, two years ago makes sense. I remember I was all freaked out that you were coming with us.
Friend: Huh?
Me: Yeah, I was all [*self-mocking tone*]: "Aiieeeee, we're going to the beach with BEYONCÉ [*parody of anxious jazz hands*]."
Beyoncé: Ha ha! [*rolls eyes, whacks me with towel*]

Skirts and Tights and Leggings

I have a question about dressing girls.

Elizabeth wears a skirt almost every single day (her choice). In warm weather, she wears shorts or bicycle pants or cropped leggings under the skirt, so that she can still play normally without having to be careful of her skirt.

In winter, she wears tights or full-length leggings with her skirt. To me, it feels as if leggings are sufficiently covering, but tights might not be. Leggings are opaque enough to completely cover underwear, and tights sometimes aren't quite as opaque, so that's an issue if the goal is for the underwear to be hidden. But even when the tights are completely opaque, they seem....more underwear-y, somehow. And that does seem to be the societal perception, if I think about how we'd perceive it in the same situation with a grown woman. Individuals may differ on whether they think leggings are pants or not, but we're not even having that discussion about tights.

So some days Elizabeth wears shorts or bicycle pants over her tights, but then that is a lot of layers, and it can be a little challenging in the bathroom. Other days I don't worry about it (especially since she's only 7) and she just wears the tights. But she is a bit of a "flip upside down" kind of girl, and when I see the tights I think, "Uh oh, her skirt," but when I see leggings I don't as much.

So what I'm curious to find out is what other people are doing for their daughter's clothes. Are tights enough for decency, or do you add bicycle shorts as well?

Reader Question: Car Seats and Potty Seats

Mattea writes:

Okay, so five kids into it, and having older, larger kids now....what car seats do you have/have had/hated/loved and in WHAT configuration in the car/minivan? We're about to have number three in April and I'm LOSING MY MIND trying to get them all to fit in out Honda Pilot without having to lay down a grand on new car seats or buy a new car. Because we JUST bought this car last June when I was sure that I wanted another baby and that this car would SURELY fit all of them. Ahem. So.
ALSO! It seems to be too much to ask that these be the safest car seats, and the ones that my children will consent to ride in b/c they are actually comfortable.
Any help! Any help at all would be lovely. Reader input would be great!
Currently I have a very tall (very long torso) 4.5 year old and a not very shrimpy either 2.5 year old and they just seem to want to outgrow things at a ferocious rate. So, when I see people still fitting their 8 (!) or even NINE year olds into the harnassed booster kind of seats on the internet and raving about how LONG your kids will fit in this and how MUCH USE you'll be sure to get out of this fabulous $300 car seat, but when I look up reviews people with long torsoed children should expect to get to about 4, maybe 5 if you're lucky---or just like living dangerously. That's when the ragey-rage and forehead abuse starts.
And, if, in your wanderings you have come across a potty seat that DOESN'T wick wee onto the rim, under the rim, onto the floor I'd be obliged :)

Hm. I HAVE liked our car seats...I think. Right now the three youngest are in those Graco booster seats that have backs on them (like this), and then you remove the backs when the child is tall/large enough. All three kids are tall enough that they're using the seats without the backs now. Once you get to plain backless booster seats, I don't think there's significant safety differences anymore from one to the next; they're just to get the child to the right height to use the car's seat belt.

When the kids were littler and needed infant seats and convertible carseats, I remember I used Consumer Reports to choose which ones to buy. Usually the top-rated one or two were triple the price and only a tiny bit safer than the next one down, so I'd get the next one down. The problem is that Consumer Reports didn't test NON-CRASH usage. That is, they didn't mention that the covers weren't removable, or that the strap was intolerably difficult to adjust. They just tested the seat in a crash---which of course is very important, but most of the seats will be through a crash 0 times and will need the covers removed 10 times and the straps adjusted 1000 times, so those issues are important to me TOO.

For all the babies, I think I got Graco infant seats. I liked the ones where you could adjust the looseness of the strap with a bit of belt that came out right under where the buckle was. SO EASY: I could loosen it wayyyy up to put the baby in without annoying him/her, then buckle it, then snug the belt up again.

When they outgrew those, the three youngest used the Evenflo convertible car seats. (I can't remember anymore what the first two kids used.) They were ENORMOUS but comfy. One of my most enduringly popular posts has been the one where I posted the instructions for removing the goddamn cover (I never did get the cover off, myself). So if I were buying such a seat today, that would probably be my primary concern: that the cover come off (FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY).

And then I think they went from those into the Graco boosters (with backs).

Our 7-seat minivan (a Toyota Sienna) has two individual seats in the middle row, and then a bench-style seat as the back row (which theoretically seats three). When we had four kids, it was easy: the two older boys sat in the back row, and the twins were in the middle row where I could more easily manage their seat belts and straps and so forth.

When Henry was born, we moved one twin car seat to the center of the back row between the two booster seats---or maybe our eldest was by then old enough not to be in a booster anymore. Let's see, he would have been eight, so yes, he probably wasn't using a booster anymore. (It's one of the upsides of having nice tall kids.)

Now that everyone's so much bigger, it's a tight fit when we go anywhere all together. Henry's car seat is in one of the two middle-row seats, and the twins are on either end of the back seat. William is smaller than Rob, so he has to cram himself in the center of the back seat; the seat belt isn't a shoulder kind, which makes me fretful. And Rob sits in the other of the two middle-row seats.

Rob is old/large enough to sit in the front seat, too, so if it's just me and the five kids, Rob sits in the front seat, William and Henry sit in the middle row, and Edward and Elizabeth sit in the back row.

But all the car seat stuff has changed since I was choosing. So it's good we have a comments section, so that other people can weigh in with more current information.


About the toilet seat, this is the one we have:

(photo from Amazon.com)

The child seat nests into the upper lid of the toilet, so you don't have to take anything on and off each time. My brother/sister-in-law, my parents, and I all have the same potty seat system, but I think there's a different brand name on each one; it seems like it's the same seat issued under different brands, rather than competing products. All, I think, have "Next Step" on the upper inner top lid, and then a different name on the lower inner top lid. It's a great seat for many, many reasons---but sadly there is still periodic wicking of wee.



[P.S. In Google Reader it LOOKS as if there was also another post today, called Lucky. But actually I posted that years ago. I went into it looking for something, and when I went out of it again it had somehow turned into an unpublished draft. So I hit publish---and it showed it published today, with all comments lost. I'm so frustrated, and am just leaving the post down. It wasn't all that awesome anyway.]

Four Books and a Movie

I had a stomach bug over the weekend that left me feeling VERY GRATEFUL for everyday non-queasy life AND got me caught up on some reading! Also, before I got sick I watched a movie:

(photo from Amazon.com)

Beginners (Netflix link) is slow-moving/indie. I especially loved Mélanie Laurent, and also now I want a Jack Russell terrier. (Like the sweet one in the movie. Not because of Mélanie Laurent.) I really liked the whole movie, and it was fun to see Christopher Plummer again. Now I feel like I'm leaving Ewan McGregor out if I don't mention him, especially if I'm even making a fuss over the DOG! I liked him too.

(photo from Amazon.com)

I finally read Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. I resisted for awhile because it sounded like I would hate it, but then I felt like I really wanted to know what everyone was talking about, so I read it. At first I thought I wouldn't be able to get through it, because I hated Amy so much at the beginning: if her first diary entry were a blog post, I would have clicked away after a few sentences. But by the end, I didn't hate anyone. It's a little hard to give a full review, for two reasons: (1) I don't want to give anything away, and (2) I accidentally found out a key plot point BEFORE reading, so I'm not sure what I would have thought about the book if I hadn't known that part ahead of time.

Here's what I liked best about the book: I found it riveting and couldn't wait to get back to reading it. It can be hard to find books like that.

I was distracted by the way SO MANY characters in the book had double letters in their names just like the author. Based on the novel's theme of in-jokes AND all the in-jokes in the acknowledgements, I'm guessing that was on purpose---which is a little irritating for those of us who think in-jokes should only be used with those who are in on them, because otherwise they're off-putting, unfriendly, and deliberately excluding.

(photo from Amazon.com)

My Mother Was Nuts, by Penny Marshall. If you like autobiographies, this was a good one: a nice mix of insider stuff, name-dropping, getting in her side of the story, etc. I liked and admired Penny Marshall more after reading it, and now feel like re-watching her stuff. I'll bet she and Carrie Fisher have the same plastic surgeon: when I looked at her author photo on the back, I thought, "Goodness, she looks a lot like Carrie Fisher!"

(photo from Amazon.com)

The One I Left Behind, by Jennifer McMahon. This one made me mad. It's about a serial killer. The chapters alternated between "back then" and "now" in a way that was supposed to increase the tension but instead just made me cranky and inclined to skim. Many sections ended in faux cliffhangers: "There was A KNOCK AT THE DOOR!!!"---oh, it was just a package being delivered. "Behind her was A MAN!!!!"---oh, it was just the neighbor getting his mail.

There's also a whole series of cutting incidents that seem to be intended to be erotic, but I couldn't identify at all so they just seemed odd. And it seemed like people who COULD identify would probably be trying to avoid such material, and those who had the POTENTIAL to identify ought not to be exposed to it in that way, so it was hard to see the value of it.

By about a third of the way through, I felt like I really had to know what happened, but I didn't want to have to read the book to find out. I tried skipping ahead, but it wasn't that kind of book. So I just read fast and resentfully and got it over with. And then the ending was unsatisfying: I was left thinking, "Wait, but what about...?" and "But that doesn't work with...." and "But in that case, wouldn't they have....?" and so forth. And the serial killer's motivations/reasons are so pat, it's irritating---the serial killer version of "the butler did it."

(photo from Amazon.com)

Marbles, by Ellen Forney. I liked this one a lot. I saw it mentioned in a magazine shortly before Christmas, and it looked likely to be my kind of graphic novel, so I added it to my wish list and Paul bought it for me. It was indeed my kind of graphic novel. It reminded me of Alison Bechdel (Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, Dykes to Watch Out For). The author has bipolar disorder, and this is the story of her diagnosis, symptoms, and treatment. Gosh, that sounds depressing! But it's also funny and interesting and informative. Right after reading it, I ordered a used copy of another of her books, Monkey Food.