Growing up

I was informed by my kids today on the first rainy day of the school year that (a) Grace will no longer be using the Littlest Pet Shop umbrella and would like to use my Discovery Channel one with the outerspace photo of the Earth on the inside of it and (b) Alex will no longer be wearing his Spongebob raincoat to class. Of course Jim points out that he would have never purchased those items in the first place to which my rebuttal was (a) the LPS umbrella was enthusiastically used for about 3 years and character umbrellas are all you can find for kids at Target and (b) the Spongebob raincoat was purchased a few years back when I needed to find a raincoat in Dallas in May and cheap $7 character ones at Wal-Mart were the ONLY ones I could find (not having the time to purchase online).

So Grace took off with my umbrella and Alex went coat-free (luckily I could walk him underneath my big umbrella). And surprisingly my raincoat search in New Jersey in September wasn't much easier than my Texas search in May (and Landsend.com was back-ordered on the basic raincoat until January!). But that little Land's End section in the shabby stand-alone Sears near me came through and they had one boy's raincoat in Alex's size in stock. So now instead of bright yellow with a big SB on the back he is just red ("Cool! It's like fire!").

On a side note, as I stopped in my NJ Target while running around today I ran across a UT Austin t-shirt on the "licensed t-shirts" rack in the boys department. So of course I HAD to buy one - what are the odds of that ever happening again?