February 22, 2012

Date Night

I'm not much of a shopper, and I'm even less of a mall shopper. Malls seem to mostly contain clothing stores, and I can't remember the last time I purchased a new item of clothing from the racks of any store. However, this  past Friday, the "Literacy Volunteers of the New River Valley" were having a used book sale in the mall, and THAT caught Joe's and my attention. We'd spent the whole day in town, alternating running errands and me getting in some work hours at the office, so it was getting dark by the time we got to the mall. Friday night at the mall with my fella - almost felt like the quinessential American date night, for teenagers anyway.

Between the two of us, we had exactly $5.99 cash on us, so we decided to let that limit our spending. It was fun but a bit overwhelming to scan through the hundreds of titles of books on the numerous tables. My favorite find was four paperback titles in the "Oz" series by L. Frank Baum. Everyone is familiar with "The Wizard of Oz", but not many people realize he wrote quite a few books about the magical kingdom. I read many of them as a kid myself and am looking forward to reading them again with our kid.

Among the books Joe found was "The Idiot's Guide to Baby Sign Language". I think the growing trend of communicating with young children through sign language is great. I've seen many of the board books with a dozen or so signs to teach your infant, but this book has a vocabulary of 150 signs suitable for kids. I'm especially interested in using sign language with our kid because American Sign Language was actually my "foreign" language in college. I took two semesters of ASL during the time period I was doing distance learning college classes from home, and my little sister and two of my cousins went through the material with me. We were fairly proficient as long as we could practice with each other, but once I transferred to Virginia Tech and moved to Blacksburg, without my practice buddies around me all the time, I slowly lost much of what I'd learned. Joe studied Spanish throughout highschool and college and has traveled extensively in Spanish speaking countries but has also gotten quite rusty in the past few years. We've talked a lot recently about using the arrival of a child as a good excuse to bone up on our skills, teaching each other, so we can maybe pass some of it on to the littl'un. So, finding this book was an added incentive.

By the time we'd narrowed down our final selections and scraped together our last penny (actually the last penny came from a generous stranger), it was dinner time. Off to the food court we went. We had no intentions of buying any food, though. We were looking to raid the condiment package displays. We snagged some salt, pepper and mustard packets, some plastic cutlery, and Joe managed to charm a little to-go container of mayonnaise from the Subway server. Back in the car, we had a bag full of food we'd brought along as we knew we'd be spending much of the day in town. Included in our stash were some hard-boiled, home-grown eggs and a loaf of bread. With the extras from the food court, we mixed ourselves up some egg salad and had a picnic in the car in the mall parking lot. By this point, our date night bore little resemblance to the quintessential American version, but we had lots of fun anyway. And, to be completely honest, we had treated ourselves to the delicious buffet lunch at our favorite Indian restaurant earlier in the day. However, we are members of the 99% after all (or the "soon-to-haves" as I prefer to think of us), so we try to keep our luxuries within limits. :)

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