This weekend was the city wide garage sales and my kids all kind of went nuts. They did some chores and spent money and did more chores to get more money, and one kid even did a koolaid stand to get even more money.
One sale went down to "25 cents for everything" and they had a whole bunch of giant plastic kid toys so now my house is filled to the brim with giant plastic things. Workbenches and race tracks and what looks like an aircraft carrier.
The youngest child now has no less than five Elmos, two of which are Tickle Me Elmo, because the older kids kept buying him Elmos.
A block down they had a "Guy Sale" instead of a "Garage Sale" with fishing lures, tools, all kinds of manly things (there was a sign for it on the corner by our house. But because of work, and other commitments, I wasn't able to get down to it until the last hour. The lures were all fairly picked over (which I know because my kids came home with some great stuff on Friday) and there were no knives by the time I got there.
I did get 8 bucks worth of lures (one of which has already nearly caught a fish for one of the kids) but the star of the show was an external frame backpack (7 dollars, it's in great shape if a bit outdated) and a free gas grill. I was just looking at the backpack and they wanted 10 dollars for it and I was waffling but she said make an offer so I offered 7 and they took it. When I got home I looked it up, it's a Kelty Trekker, but there are a bunch of models from 100 - 250 bucks new. It seems in good shape.
Today I took the backpack to the Aldi's near the house and came home with 35 pounds of groceries (I weighted it on the new scale that one of the kids got for 50 cents). I just was putting things in the cart but it wound up completely filling the backpack and I had to carry the bread home in my hands (didn't want to squish it).
And the grill was cheap, cheap, cheap, they wanted 5 dollars, but I was waffling on it and they saw it and said, look its the end of the sale, why don't you just go home and take it (I had 5 of the kids with me and a stroller so I couldn't just take it home.)
Found a spot in the back yard for it. It's my first gas grill. I already did hot dogs and burgers on it and it's a grill, it works, I gotta get used to it instead of charcoal, and it's going to need a deeper cleaning than the first wipe down cleaning I've given it already. But it's so freeing to just fire it up instead of waiting for the charcoal.