a tale of two shopping trips

so today . . . i went shopping. twice.

the first time was early this afternoon. rollie needed new basketball shoes, because he finally blew his out this morning. he likes nikes--they fit his feet really well--and usually he gets them at mervyn's when they are on sale. but our mervyn's closed just before christmas. so he came home from playing basketball this morning and wanted to know where i thought he should go for shoes. we decided to try j.c. penney. when we got there i directed him to the shoe department, he found the nikes, tried them on, bought them, and was ready to head home. which we did. we were there about 20 minutes.

later in the day diandra and i went shopping. my birthday was last month, and rather than buy me a gift, she wanted to take me shopping. she said that would be a lot more fun than just watching me open something that she had chosen. but we have both been busy, so today was the first chance we had to go. i decided to start at old navy, so off we went. we entered the store and started picking up things we saw that we liked. by the time we got to the back of the store (about 45 minutes later) we both had an armload of clothes and headed off to the dressing rooms. we spent the next 30 minutes trying on sweaters and jeans and skirts and dresses. and laughing at each other. some of the "outfits" we came up with were pretty funny--especially since i was wearing argyle knee socks and refused to take them off (my feet were cold!) decisions had to be made, but we finally headed to the car with our purchases almost two hours later.

these were two very different experiences. rollie's goal was basketball shoes in the shortest possible time--go in, get them, get out. diandra's goal was spending time with me--looking around, trying things on, making decisions, trying on something else, helping each other decide what was worthy of our (mostly her) hard-earned cash. and yet both trips were fun. because i was with two of my favorite people--my husband and my daughter!