Stretching Money

Spent this noontime on a (dreaded!) shopping excursion with my daughters at my preferred discount department store. The 10 year old is the harder to fit, due to her rapidly morphing body from little girl into teenager, so finding pants that are comfortable in the waist AND not too long can be something of an ordeal. (She wore a juniors size 3 pair of jeans on this outing, but scored two new pairs of girls' size 14 jeans as well as a pair of basketball shorts & several inexpensive tee shirts hearkening to the 40th anniversary of Woodstock.) The 14 year old was relatively easy--she's budget conscious already, so she found the "five for $10" sorts of things & selected her needed garments with an eye toward both her tastes & my wallet.

Then came the challenge (again, due to the younger one) of selecting composition notebooks & folders with clamps, which she's required to have for school. We already have filler paper, single subject spiral bound notebooks, pens, & pencils left over from last year, so we can round out the remainder of the necessary items at our local dollar store. Miss 14 grabbed one 5 subject notebook & a package of pens, plus an extra pack of pens for her younger sister, and pronounced herself ready to start high school with only that. The 10 year old's school is a tad obsessive about the kids getting COMPOSITION notebooks instead of the spiral ones (to the tune of AT LEAST 5 of them!), & they're the one thing we didn't have in storage at home, so I HAD to get them. I hadn't thought there'd be much room for differences in them, but today we also found marbled ones in (besides the old standard black & white) PURPLE & white, ORANGE & white, BLUE & white, GREEN & white, PLUS some with Internet conversational abbreviations on solid pink or solid black covers (e.g. LOL, TTYL--natch, more expensive than their marble-covered cousins)! Predictably, Miss 10 had to get TWO "coolio!" (her adjective, & nothing I say convinces her that Coolio is a rapper!) composition notebooks.

Long story short, I'm glad I got out of there with my checking account still intact & tried to impart some lessons in thrift to Miss 10 (who probably won't internalize them until about, oh, 2020!).