Weeks In Review

Boy oh boy, I've missed you Blogger! 

This post will probably seem as though we have not had much going on but that is because the last two weeks have been totally consumed by our two weekend garage sale.  The money was great but it is a LOT of work.  But, now that it's all over, I can happily resume my blogging responsibilities.  :) 

Week of June 21st - 27th

Girls
My sister Stacey was going to be in town for 2 weekends in a row so we decided it was the perfect time for the girls to spend the week with her.  They left on Sunday and returned on Thursday night.  Since my sister already wrote about their week, I'm going to save myself some time and link you to her blog to read about their week. 

Volleyball
I'm going to again save time by not continuing to go into detail about or volleyball games.  I love my teammates but we can all agree, we suck!  :)  This week we lost to a team of 6, but there were 4 girls and 2 guys.  (Read next week... it gets worse)

Garage Sale
I decided a couple of weeks ago that it was time for a garage sale.  Since Nick and I moved in together and we got mass amounts of gifts for the wedding, we had an overload of stuff.  I think we had 2 of every small kitchen appliance you can imagine!  Plus baskets and bins full of kids clothes that needed to go.

I invited my sister, friend Katie and cousin Kim to join in the sale too.  We spent each night during the week getting ready for the sale that took place Thursday night, Friday morning and Saturday morning. 

Thursday night garage sales were a new concept to me but I had been hearing that they were great nights and had good turn outs so we thought we would try it.  Turns out that everyone was right.  Thursday night sales are the best.  We sold over $1,000 during the 3 days, half of which was brought in on Thursday night alone. 

We had so much to begin with that even after all our sales over the weekend we still had a lot of stuff left.  Plus, none of us were able to get through everything in our houses that we wanted to so, we decided to leave the tables up and do it again the next weekend. 

Week of June 28th - July 4th

Volleyball
This week was even worse...  We lost to a team of 4 people!  Enough said.

Beiber Fever
Wednesday night Justin Beiber was in town for a concert at Wells Fargo Arena.  My friend Stephanie invited Ashley and I to go with her and her youngest daughter Sierra.  The girls have been excited for weeks!

After waiting in a hot and sweaty line for a crappy $35 t-shirt for Ashley that was smaller than a hand towel and then spending $11 for our dinner consisting of a hot dog, pretzel and drink, we took our seats just as the first opening act took the stage.  I say first because there were 3.  Yes, 3.  First it was The Stunners, a group of girls that sang cover songs.  Then there was Jessica Dyrell (or something like that).  And then there was the real opening act of Sean Kingston.  The concert started at 7 but Justin Beiber didn't come out until 9!  I thought that was a bit late considering the average age for everyone in attendance was probably 12. 

Anyway, Ashley was cracking me up the whole time.  I might have watched her more than I watched the actual concert.  At first she was completely freaked out.  I think part of it was being up in the balcony and the other part was the loudness of everyone screaming.  She would grip the sides of her chair when everyone would scream as if the Boogie Man just got her. I asked her what was wrong and she said, "It gets so loud that I feel like my chair is going to fall".  That lasted about 20 minutes and then she got use to the noise. 

By the time Justin Beiber came out onto stage she was pretty tired.  She would crawl up in her chair and lean against me while he would sing.  Then each time he would finish and say something like, "How are you doing Iowa?" she would sit up and scream at the top of her lungs.  Sometimes she would jump out of her chair if everyone else did.  Then he would start singing again and she'd crawl back up in a ball on the chair and lean against me.  I'm still not sure if she was tired or bored but she said she had fun.

Sierra is a HUGE Beiber fan so she was super exited the whole time and loved every minute of it.  It was very cute! :) 

Garage Sale
So, as I said earlier, we decided to do the garage sale for a second weekend.  We had more stuff the second weekend than we did the first!  This time I hadn't planned to take Friday off so we had the sale on Thursday night, Friday night and Saturday morning.  Again, Thursday night was our biggest night!  Friday night was a gamble to us and ended up being bad.  We only sold $140 that night and ended up closing an hour early because it was so slow.  I'm not sure why Thursday night's are good and Friday's are bad but whatever, lesson learned.  Saturday was another great day.  We stayed open an hour later because people continued to come.  Between 8am and 2pm I think there was only 5 minutes total where we didn't have someone there. 

This weekend ended up being better than last, but just by a little.  We sold $1,150 between us all this week!  We would love to continue to have garage sales if we are going to make this much money every weekend but we had to call it quites or my neighbors would probably kick me out of the neighborhood.  There were cars everywhere and people would park in their driveways or block their driveways.  I know we live on a cul-de-sac so parking isn't great but it's like 50 feet people... park legally and then walk a few steps! 

4th of July
The rest of the weekend was pretty lazy.  The girls and I did some shopping with our garage sale money and we went over to TJ and Alicia's new house on Sunday evening.  They just moved to Ankeny so we are excited to have more friends in town. 

Nick had bought gigantic 3 ft sparklers for the girls so we did those when we got home around 10.  The neighbors were out finishing off their fireworks too so we had some additional entertainment.