Goody bags! All I wanted was goody bags!

Last Halloween, I bought Halloween pencils for Lily to give to all her classmates. I figured they would get plenty of candy from other sources. I thought the other kids might pass out a candy bar. Instead, many of the kids passed out elaborate treat bags with candy, stickers, little crayons or notepads. I felt guilty that all my kid passed out was a lousy pencil. You know, like those T-shirts that say “My Grandma went to Fort Lauderdale and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” (What else is there to buy in Fort Lauderdale?)

So I resolved to do better for the Valentine’s Day party. Lily and I picked out Valentines in January, and on Monday we bought candy for the goody bags I planned to put together. Walmart didn’t have any goody bags, so we couldn’t cross that item off our list.

I don’t like dragging my kids to more than one or two places a day. Whenever I’ve tried to go to three stores, all in one outing, the girls have huge meltdowns, and so do I. I think we successfully went to three stores once. We bought Lily a winter coat at one store, looked for snow boots at one store and failed, and found boots at the third store. Whew! AND it was snowing. Nothing like waiting ’til the last minute!

So, goody bags. We went to Michael’s on Wednesday, and there were no goody bags to be found. They had only one tiny section of Valentine’s Day items for 50% off, and all the Easter stuff was out instead. Oh, well, those crafty types must buy things way in advance. It was only February 11, for crying in the beer!

The grocery store was the next stop. The goody bags were on the very top shelf, and a man on a cell phone was taking some down. (Please, please leave some for us!) As he let me look at the bags, Lily told me they weren’t pretty enough. The man was very nice, and told us that those were the only bags they had; he had already looked all over the store. I showed Lily how cute they were. “Look, they have a little teddy bear on them!”

“But they don’t have a handle! They have to have a handle!” And she started to cry.

I was not very compassionate, sad to say. I was tired,(I’m always tired) wet (it was raining; did I mention that?) and Emmy needed her nap. I simply said, “These are what we’re buying; let’s go.” (We had reached our two store limit.)

When we got home and opened the bags, Lily decided she liked them. During Emmy’s nap we assembled them, and the next day Lily had a nice treat for her classmates.

Aren’t they cute?