Preparing for the Big One

Early in the week, I had planned to do errands Thur pm. I was looking forward to going by myself. It's practically relaxing to not have little kids along. :) However, since we found out school was cancelled for Fri due to the impending storm, I asked Katie to go with me. She loves to shop, and she really is a good help, too. And I'm so glad she came! Because she was with me, I actually had FUN waiting in the incredibly long lines.

Everyone in Hagerstown was out to Walmart and the grocery stores. We started out in Aldis, and it was quite full as well, but they had 4 very fast cashiers working-- didn't wait long at all. Walmart was a different story. We wanted to buy another remote for the Wii game Katie won, and you have to pay for those in the electronics dept, so we waited in line with a couple hundred other people there. Saw a family that used to be at Grace years ago-- had a son in K's class-- was fun to see how he'd grown.

Then we finished our other Walmart shopping and started looking for a line. For most of the lines, I couldn't even find the end-- the went back into the clothing area and snaked around in there. We were able to jump on the end of a 20 or less line that went way back between the clothing and the groceries. As soon as we got in line, the cashier came back and handed me the Land Closed sign to hold. She looked apologetic and I soon found out why-- I had to turn people away from our line... so I took to holding it behind us so people could see it. I still had to turn away a few people, but that was definitely better. For a while, Katie balanced the sign on her head, and that worked, too. :) Katie had the idea to play the alphabet game, and that was the ideal place to play it! When we finally made it to the cashier, I asked if I could get a discount in return for holding her sign, she didn't let me, but she sure did thank me.

By the time we got out of there, some of the other stores I had thought about heading to were closed, so just finished up at the grocery store. Home by 10:15-- very happy to have had fun alone time with Katie. She seems to crave it more than the other kids.

Now it's Friday! Everyone's home... waiting for snow. We have a bit left from Wed's snow, but it got up to 40 that day, so much of it melted. Current predictions are for it to start midday and end with up to 18 inches. All of our Friday and Saturday activities have been cancelled. It'll be interesting to see about Sunday. It's Superbowl! Can people handle cancelling their Superbowl parties? Probably they would brave the snow for that. Actually watching the game is a pretty low priority for us, but our lifegroup is planning to have a party... and we'd enjoy the party part. :)

Maybe my next post will have pics of the mountains of snow... and maybe we'll be laughing because everyone called off all these activities for 2 lousy inches.

Michelle