Shopping

Shopping has never been my favorite pasttime, but I enjoyed looking at girlie things this weekend. We took the tape measure on our shopping trip and what we realized is that Gracie is going to be really hard to fit...definitely she will need slims. Now I understand why some of her dresses were so short during our visit. We don't know how up-to-date her weight report was, but 23 pounds isn't very much for a 4 1/2 year old. According to the weight on the size charts, she should be a 2T, but her waist to floor measurement of 19 inches means that most 2T long pants will be capris! We also measured the waists on the 2T and 3T pants and most of them were about 20 inches. When I measured her waist on our visit, it was 18 1/2 inches. Either I will be adding elastic to the waists of everything, she will need a belt (which we bought today), or she will be wearing a lot of dresses and tights.

Buying just a few things really increased my anticipation. I can't wait to bring Gracie home. Since Mark has been working so many weekends, we made a list of things to do before she gets here and are trying to make sure that we have everything ready in time. I guess we are "nesting." On his last weekend off, we cleaned the garage and "dejunked" so we have more room for storage; this weekend we shopped for a mattress, headboard, dresses (for picking her up and the embassy appointment), and shoes. I took the little paper cut-outs of her footprint for shoe shopping and she will need either a size 7 or 8!  She has long skinny feet like her daddy.

It is good that we started looking early, because we didn't buy anything except some little cotton tank tops, a set of three tiny little belts (that Mark will have to shorten), and one pair of pajamas. We did choose a mattress to buy that we will order next week, but there were just too many cute little dresses that we couldn't decide on any of them. I also went through all of the donated clothes and organized them by size so I know what we will need, sort of. Hmmmm...it has been a long time since I have had a toddler around. What will we need to take with us for 8 days in Bulgaria with a 4-year-old? We may have to take her shopping and check an extra bag for the return trip. I wonder what she would think of the mall...