Saturday, 14 February 2009

• Your Junk, My Treasure

  
  No sooner than the festive holiday decor has made it's way back to the storage closet are we  then inundated with red and white hearts and tempting chocolates. It's one more step from the frigid winter into the freshness of spring and I love it.  Sure, there are people in other parts of Canada still shoveling snow but my mortgage is four times theirs and I have to fork out a few hundred dollars just to get off this little island so I don't buy into the whole “it could be worse” theory.  Yes, it could always be worse.  But telling an Ontario native that it could be worse had they been an Eskimo in the arctic tundra probably falls on the same deaf ears. It's all relative. For me, just 2 inches of the white stuff is enough to instill the fear of winters past.
  
  It's either my hatred for the cold or my constant denial that winter actually happens here which leads me to the realization that our twin boys are about to hit Mt.Washington for a day of tubing with Daddy and I don't have a single piece of snow gear for them.  Don't get me wrong, I didn't issue a full quarantine as soon as the snow started to fall.  My boys got a healthy dose of outdoor fun almost every day throughout the snowy weeks and they absolutely loved it. We just did it in small doses where warm layers would suffice. Although I don't think I intentionally avoided buying proper snow clothes, I realize now that buying them would almost be resigning myself to admitting that winter, snow and minus zero temperatures actually exist.
  
  With the boys being only three years old, I know that the kids will spend more time driving to and from the mountain than actually on the mountain. I cringe at the thought of dropping $100 or more on snow pants, jackets, mitts and boots, this late in the game.  Just in time for the snow to melt and the boys to catapult another three or four inches before the dreaded fluff makes a return appearance next winter. And let's be honest, sending your child out to play in the snow with their pants up to their shins and their jackets up to their elbows doesn't exactly get you invited to the neighbourhood block parties.
  
  Because throwing away a hundred bucks isn't typically my idea of a good time, I started thinking creatively.  Who do I know I could call with snow clothes their size?  The only friends we have with kids the boys' age have daughters....and although one of our boys has an affinity for purple and chose bright pink Dora bed sheets over Spiderman, Daddy might not be too thrilled with walking around Mt. Washington showcasing his lineage in a sea of hot pink and Cinderella embroidery.  Okay, next idea.
  
  As I loaded a pile of clothing, household goods and toys into the back of the van for yet another donation drop-off, a lightbulb went off.  I'll look for snow gear in my hometown's plethora of thrift shops!  The place seriously has more secondhand stores than coffee shops and seeing as winter is almost over, there's got to be some recently purged toddler snow attire just waiting to be rescued from the dingy smell of the unwanted.
  
  The next day, I announced to the boys that we were going “shopping”.  This is often a very good motivator for them as they correspond “shopping” with either the place food or toys live. Both of which they are extremely fond of.  We piled into the van and within a few minutes were walking from musty store to musty store in the five-block radius I affectionately dubbed “Thrift Store Mecca”. I combed through the kids clothes while the boys stood amazed at the shelves and shelves of abandoned toys.  Allowing them to pick one toy each, they quickly gravitated towards the giant bags of junk toys.  These are the toys that by themselves are absolute garbage but perhaps put enough of them together and they are just barely worth $1.75.  To you and I, the bag's contents range from junk to total junk but to the boys -- it was treasure.  Jack actually said to me in disbelief, “mommy...I get ALL these toys?”
  
  “Yep honey, you get ALL those toys...” I say with a slight tone of disbelief myself. Disbelief that I'm going to actually take that entire bag of junk home with us when I just unloaded four bags of it out the back of the van.
  
  After two days of this new approach to shopping, I have to admit that somewhere along the way I actually fell in love with it.  The dingy smell truly loses some of it's potency when you realize that you can get fairly current six dollar magazines for fifty cents and that your still-naive children are just as happy with a $1.75 bag of junk as they are with a $20 toy-of-the-moment.
  
  Although it wasn't without compromise (“broken zipper” is now only deemed true if said zipper won't go up...ever) I found two winter jackets, two pairs of snow pants, fantastic insulated mitts and insulated boots for the grand total of $14.  Sure, my otherwise styling handsome little men will be complete fashion misfits for the first time in their lives but let's be honest, I saved over $80!  I'm fairly certain that the boys will be the last ones to realize they don't colour-coordinate while they bomb down the snowy mountain for a few hours.  Mission accomplished!
  
  Now I just need a way to break it to my purple-loving son that his smaller-sized twin brother is in fact getting the girly purple snow boots.
  
  
  

  
  

  
  
  

  • 7:46 AM
  • 60 Views
  • 4 eProps
  • 5 Comments