Madness

The mid-winter break festivities continue!

Madness Pt 1:

We made our way to Costco via bus today. It was quite the trek with our crew--6 children, 4 and under--but we really wanted to check it out and eat at the food court. haha. It was very exciting arriving at Costco and they had lots of good stuff. Unfortunately I had 0 space to haul it back with me so I opted to just enjoy looking around. The actual store wasn't too packed, but the children were crrraazzyyy. At one point Sarah, Nika, and I were in the check out line, and our girls were all lying on the floor hahaha. It was super embarrassing but I was also like "these children never have space just to run around in the winter" so I could see why they wanted to just be kids and get their wiggles out!

The actual eating was also chaotic. We were trying to juggle taking kids to the bathroom, finding a place to sit in the 6 table food court, keeping the babies happy, and navigating around missed nap times. haha. Even with the chaos it felt like an adventure, though, being with friends.

Madness Pt. 2 featuring guest writer Marty:

A few weeks ago, Lizzie was let in on a monumental secret. A secret that I thought was surely too good to be true. Once a month, the museum of natural history hosts evening hours for everyone with a membership. At these evening hours, members can participate in a scavenger hunt at one of the exhibits. Upon completion of this scavenger hunt, all of the members (including the kids that came along for the ride) were given a $50 Nordstrom's gift card. This was limited to the first 250 people but apparently there's never that many people. A family membership to the museum of natural history costs only $164, so if you are a family of four you can make up the price of a membership in Nordstrom dollars with only one visit, despite the member nights happening once a month for the whole year you are a member.

Lizzie and I decided to go ahead and give it a shot. Today was the member day, and we planned on getting to the museum a few minutes early, walking in at opening, leisurely completing the scavenger hunt and heading home with our $200 in Nordstrom bucks early enough to get the girls to bed on time. However, when we arrived at the museum, there was already a line stretching down the block.

The line moved quickly, but once we were inside we had to wait in another line to actually get our tickets inside since we had neglected to "reserve" our arrival time in advance. At this point we were pretty disappointed but we dove in anyways to see if we could salvage our night. Luckily for us, we had been at the museum only a few weeks ago with Courtney and Michael and knew exactly where to find the exhibit. Once inside, Lizzie took over and starting knocking things off the list one by one. We had no idea how many people were ahead of us, so at this point we still thought that we would be out of the money.

When we only had one question left to go, we ran into one of Lizzie's good friends who was also there with her family. She helped us get the last answer and we all took off for the prize desk where we were met with another line. The whole time we stood there, I was waiting for the inevitable announcement that they had run out of gift cards, or only slightly less worse, that they would only be giving away one per party. Much to my surprise, when we made it up to the front, they gave us 2 $50 gift cards (after Lizzie made sure to ask if we both got one) but unfortunately, they didn't want to give one to Emi. So despite our poor strategy and preparation heading into the night, we still walked away with a very good outcome.

Needless to say, as we walked home way past the girls' bedtime, Lizzie and I made our attack plan for next month. Hopefully this month was a fluke and the competition won't be as fierce next month, but I'm not holding my breath. Stay tuned...