The Adventures of Black Friday

In previous years Gail and I had ventured out of the house briefly in the afternoon of Black Friday to check out some of the great sales, but this year we decided to brave the super-early crowds to see what deals we could find. We arrived at Kohl's at 5:30am and were pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't overly crowded, and there were plenty of employees available to help us find the specific deals from their sale ad that we were looking for. We both bought 7 inch digital photo frames which were a spectacular deal, and I bought several Christmas gifts for Ethan and for other relatives. We were amazed at how quickly we were able to get in and out of the store and were also pleasantly surprised at how friendly the other early bird customers were (especially after later hearing about the trampling death of a Wal-Mart employee somewhere on the west coast). At Kohl's I was trying to hold two enormous boxes containing Nerf guns for my cousin's boys, and a lady stopped her shopping to help me stack up the boxes so that they were manageable for me to carry to a register. Wal-Mart was jam-packed with customers, and another shopper took a break from finding all of the items on her list to help me locate a boy Cabbage Patch newborn doll (which we are saving to give Ethan just before Baby Q arrives so that he has a little baby boy to take care of too while mommy takes care of the new baby). Between the 2 of us searching the giant mountain of CP newborn dolls, we were able to locate one boy doll- yay! I think that I will be up for trying another wee-hours-of-the-morning Black Friday again next year, as this year's adventure turned out to be a great one!