Fun Was Had By All

Beyond the serious part (see previous post), there were the other parts.

And the eating part was a success. No problems there. Undoing the damage, on the other hand, might be a little problematic. But it was worth it. Mmhmmm.

And then another part was the adventure part. Thursday night, after much eating and playing of games and um, more eating, everyone was asleep by midnight or soon thereafter. Everyone but me and my husband.

In the town where my parents live and where we were enjoying our Thanksgiving day, there is an outlet mall---presumably one of the biggest there is, not that that's relevant---and a new trend started this year: The outlets were open from midnight Thanksgiving to midnight Friday night. Who in their right minds would want to go shopping in the middle of the night? Well, I would for one ("right-minded" being in question)!! And the reason I thought it'd be a good idea was that I wouldn't have to deal with all the crowds and long lines. I figured there'd be a fair amount of people but it'd be better than facing the awful crowds later (there were a few stores I wanted to hit, and I don't make it to the outlets very often, so it was a perfect plan).

Or so I thought. I could not believe the amount of people out and about, shopping their guts out. And the lines!!! In quite a few stores, we just abandoned shop---as it were---because the lines were way too long. But I did manage to snag several good deals without too painful a wait. (Except the one store where a girl two people in front of us decided to let 8 of her friends cut in with her. They kept appearing from nowhere to purchase their items. It was amazingly annoying and rude).

My husband was a good sport, even standing solo in line while I ducked into the next store. What a guy!

By 3:00 or soon thereafter, we were back at my parents' place, tired and ready for bed. As we pulled into the driveway, a worrisome thought occurred to me: what if my mom got up sometime between midnight and 3:00, saw that the front door was unlocked, and locked it? What if that happened? She didn't know that we'd decided to go shopping, and so she would have assumed we were tucked downstairs in our beds.

Good ole Mom. Ever the careful watchdog. Ever the defender of unsuspecting sleepers. Ever the vigilant keeper of the lock.

And so. There we were. And it had started to rain at this point. And it was cold. We tried knocking quietly. My husband tried throwing pebbles at the closest bedroom window. We knocked some more. Finally we went back in the van, cranked up the heat for a bit and tried to figure out Plan B.

We didn't want to wake up the whole household if we could help it. My dad had plans to be at a job at 7:00 the next morning, so we didn't want to wake him. My brother and his wife have a baby who's not the best sleeper and we didn't want to be the cause for him waking up; we'd never hear the end of that one. So we had to find a way to arouse someone but just not everyone.

Every little bit my husband would go out and try something new. I called him on the cell phone and it sang its little song outside my brother's bedroom window. No go. Knocking didn't work. Calling out their names didn't work. We tried calling my mom's cell phone. Turned off. We tried calling my brother's cell phone. No luck. We didn't want to call the main house phone in case every room had a phone and we woke up the whole place. Finally, after an hour and a half of this, my husband rapped on the window where my brother was until he woke up. (Unfortunately, he also awoke my sister-in-law who was unable to go back to sleep and who then lay awake for an hour and a half. Sorry!! But we didn't wake the sleeping babe, so that was a plus). Another plus is that we didn't have to sleep on the trampoline.

SO....at 4:30, cold and tired, my brother unlocked the door and we were able to stumble down the stairs to our wonderful warm, soft bed and pillow. Nothing was as lovely as that moment. Bliss.

The next time I have a brilliant idea, somebody shoot me.