Black Friday

A long, good day.  We headed out about 9:30 this morning...I know...not serious Black Friday shoppers.  There just weren't any deals that I thought warranted getting up at the crack of dawn.  First, there were four of us, me and all three kids.  We found Evan a pair of jeans pretty quickly and my nephew came and rescued him from the mall.  He only went with me because the boy did not own one pair of jeans.  He was wearing shorts every week day and khakis to church on Sunday.  The only thing that will likely change is he will wear jeans on Sunday....once in a while he will otherwise wear his jeans. He definitely has his father's thermostat and not his mother's.

Jessie did amazingly well for how long we shopped.  Got to the mall at 10:00 and didn't leave till 6:40.  Thankfully, we had borrowed a stroller.  She had gotten too big for the one we had and we haven't yet gotten a special needs stroller, which I think we will break down and do hopefully very soon.  She just doesn't have endurance for a lot of walking or standing.  She gets in and out every couple of minutes.  Takes a little rest, gets out a while.  The main shopping we did today was to let Jordan pick out some clothes for me to get her for Christmas.  I really wish I could surprise her but truly it works best to let her pick out and try on most of her clothes.  We did that last year for the first time....she's been asking me for days if we could do that again this year, that it was one of her favorite gifts last year.  We don't buy bunches of clothes, we are pretty thrifty, so we don't usually shop for and buy several pieces at once, so this was a real treat.  I enjoyed it too. 

Jessie of course likes to think it's all about her (which it usually is, but today wasn't) so she had to try on a lot of clothes Jordan took in the dressing room.  She'd tell me, "I need a medium" or "I need large"!  Truly, what made the day such a success in Jessie's eyes was getting to eat Chick-Fil-A twice in one day. 

We went to the movies straight from the mall to see THE BLIND SIDE.  We were meeting friends there, we were inside looking for seats while they were in line to get tickets.  It sold out just before they could get tickets so we traded our tickets for the 9:00 showing.  This confused Jessie; we had some serious talking to do to get her to believe we were coming back to the movies, this same day, that we were gonna come back so we could get to sit with Joshua.  Whew! So we went to Atlanta Bread and got something to eat till time for the movie.  It's been a while since I've seen a movie I loved that much.  I hadn't known anything about the story till the movie came out but now I want to read the book.  I've said before that I always like to know everybody's "story", why they do what they do.  So, I want to read the book and get "the rest of the story".  When the movie ended and we stood up, Jessie wasn't ready to leave and was saying something I couldn't understand at first.  Then, I realized she said she wanted to clap.  Guess she was telling me cause she didn't want to be the only one. We clapped together and she said, "Michael got to play football".  For a minute, I was a little embarrassed that we were the the only two people there clapping.  I quickly got over it, the feeling of embarrassment was replaced with, "Wow, Jessie has a way of taking the simplest, most ordinary thing and making it extraordinary".  From almost the very beginning, she has brought me outside of myself in a way that otherwise probably would  never have happened.  Just one of the ways she has grown me. 

On a regular basis I continue to thank God that in giving us Jessie, He met His expectations, and not ours.  As I say at bedtime when we pray together, "Thank you God for Jessie, I love her so much.........."